Comment by achow
17 hours ago
Google seems to have made an official post on Reddit describing the feature set in detail:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin...
[Edit]
And, the feature set references the 'AI mouse pointer' from this Deepmind blog..
Wiggling the mouse is what people do involuntarily when the computer isn’t working right. They are setting themselves up for Gemini to be the uninvited Clippy, except this will send everything you are working on to Google to harvest data from.
The video they show (which is probably exaggerated by cutting out LLM generation time) is pretty sci-fi. I don't know how it works in practice, but it looks fun to try out. If this could run locally, I'd love to have a feature like that.
Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage. A lot of people who will feed Gemini/ChatGPT/Bing/Claude/shady clusters across the internet for bargain bin prices/Mistral every detail of their lives will probably be fine with Gemini as long as it doesn't interfere unnecessarily.
It probably works similar to how Gemini works in Android for a while now.
You can point or select anywhere on the screen and it understands and searches the context. If you select a text block, even text inside an image, it allows to copy or search the text online. Otherwise it can search the image.
I use it often. It's intuitive and fast even on non-flagship phones.
I'd wager their A/B tests went well enough to warrant a port from phones to their new "Chromebook".
> Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage.
That assumes you intended to use AI. People are going to accidentally upload random private content to google.
It's the unofficial "where's my mouse pointer" macro
At least one DE I've used (MacOS? KDE?) even had it as an official macro that would make the pointer 10x bigger when you shook it
MacOS and KDE both do this. In KDE the pointer keeps getting larger the longer you shake it until it is truly absurdly huge.
KDE does that by default. Handy sometimes, funny sometimes.
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It is deliberately designed for maximum accidental invocations so the managers and execs behind it can claim the large user numbers in their promo packets.
Oh my goodness, the use cases are so… badly conceived:
> If a friend sends you a picture on your phone and you need to email it from your laptop, the file is just there — no need to email it to yourself.
So are there really people who will email a photo to themselves from their phone to… send the photo in an email?
Interesting to note that there is no mention of processor or operating system in that post. I’m guessing that it’s Android in a laptop form factor which I suppose might be something that some people would want, but I’m not one of them.
Getting files on and off of a phone is shockingly hard. Shockingly. It's even worse on an iPhone, if you don't have a mac. To get my photos from my iPhone to my PC, I had to first upload them to iCloud and then download them again. My phone and computer are, like, a foot away from each other but I had to send the photos across the country to some server and back just to look at them.
Everyone emails themself stuff, that's normal. The weird part is how often will you ever need to email it specifically from your laptop, but it's already on your phone? If it's on your phone and you need to email it to someone, couldn't you just email from your phone?
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Oh, I use use AirDrop to myself for this. Yes, given my photo library syncs to iCloud, just opening Photos seems like it makes sense on a fast WAN which I sort-of do have, but of course, iCloud syncs only happen when the device decides the mood is just right, and can't be triggered manually, because I guess that would just be 'clutter' in the UI.
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KDE Connect may work for you. (You don't have to use KDE.)
I remember in late 10s I could just connect my iPhone to a windows machine and the photos folder would be right there, mounted, with the typical iOS filenames for each picture. Is this a false memory? Maybe I was on a Mac and just forgot?
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Photos taken on iPhone are automatically synchronized with iCloud.. I guess you can just go to iCloud.com and download them on your PC?
If you want to send a photo to your friend from your iPhone, just click on the photo and click the "share" button, then you have many options, including sending it via Email..
What am I missing?
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That's mostly an iPhone problem. Plugging in an Android phone still works, and wireless exchange with QuickShare also works on most devices. With Google reverse engineering Airdrop, I hope they can get the Android <-> macOS experience to finally work correctly soon as well.
My only real use of Google Keep is as a cross-device clipboard.
LocalSend works really well across platforms in a LAN, no uploading to some server required.
I'm super techy but I admit that I just use Signal to send me a "Note to self" whenever I need a file from my phone on my computer quickly. For images I just use immich, but texting myself is honestly the quickest way for files because the experience is indeed terrible.
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I personally just have a discord with myself as the only member. With their webhooks API you can even automate the PC side.
I emailed myself many times to transfer some files between phone and computer. I would say at least once every week.
It is a solved problem https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ismartcoding.plain/
There is also localsend, but plainapp needs to run in only one device.
You can just use Dropbox or equivalent.
They should have just said "USE it on your laptop", not email it.
I all the time use my phone as a camera (esp. for coin photography) than e-mail the photos to myself as the most convenient way to get them on my desktop where I can edit them with GIMP etc.
I just open photos.google.com and grab them. No need to fiddle on my phone.
When on wifi, the photo backup upload starts immediately. If it doesn't (possibly due to your settings, this used to be my issue) you can manually open the photos app and tap the backup now button.
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It’s a poor example. Recently, I did have to email myself photos taken with my phone to access them on my laptop. Would be nice if they were automatically synced. It’s work phone and laptop so I could have gone through OneDrive or Box but just as inconvenient as email.
These are usually targeted at kids and newbies. My mom would 100% appreciate that feature for photos and pdfs. She still struggles with files on Windows and managing files are even less clear on chromebook.
Yeah I and i suspect a lot of others email myself little files all the time because surprisingly that's the most convenient way to get those files quickly from phone to laptop.
I do that all the time with my iPhone and my windows machine, sadly. Still not a particularly compelling feature, just speaks to how sad our modern ecosystem is.
I feel like very much not the target market for this. Tokyo Vintage Shopping Trip? LOL
I got mad when I bought a Chromebook thinking it was a cheap laptop I could install any OS on only to find it was boatloader locked and the model I bought hadnt been cracked yet. Say nothing of all of Google's recent practices with Android. This whole thing just sounds like the plague.
> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.
This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.
Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.
Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?
`[text](link)` is the syntax used to create a link. But since `TKTK` isn't a valid URI, it doesn't render a link. My guess is TKTK is placeholder and they were supposed to fill it in before posting on reddit... but forgot?
edit: hah, maybe someone from Google saw my comment. This has now been fixed and TKTK replaced with https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...
TKTK is a common placeholder for something that should be filled in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)
Looks like the link got fixed.
I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.
I bet this is an LLM output mistake that escaped human proofreading.
I had an instance of it this morning: Claude proposed a shell command containing a URL and it used this format, which is broken in context.
Posting an official announcement of an AI-powered laptop on Reddit were the users there tend to have a hard Anti-AI stance is certainly something.
I haven't been around reddit much for a few years, but in the past at least, /r/android was one of the best tech communities on the internet. It was even better than the iPhone subs for iPhone discussion.
I mean if you think about it, the type of person to own an android phone and care enough about phones to join a community is pretty much guaranteed to only be a tech geek.
AI mouse pointer is definitely not something I wanted to think about today. A recent HN post implored vibe coders not to modify the mouse pointer and now we get this from Google.
"We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks."
A disaster from the first step.
Damn... ~1min in he verbally asks to put the 2 ingredients on the list.
Like... my dude that's way even slower than drag&drop the text on a light right next to it!
Same later on about changing the calendar appointment from whatever to 8pm... he is behind a desktop with a mouse, just input the number or click on the arrows to adjust.
I bet some people will mention that those are "just" simple to understand examples or that it's great for accessibility ... but it's not. It's not reliable enough for complex cases and not reliable enough for accessibility. So... yes JUST basic examples that are slower than other means.
PS: I did prototypes using voice and pointing in XR and yes that paradigm IS powerful, it's just being multimodal.
Well, that AI mouse pointer idea is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in quite awhile. Hard pass, do not want, do not trust anyone involved.
“Hey google, do something with this. Huh, I guess that’s fine.”
> It's really easy to access your phone’s files right from your Googlebook's file browser.
Yeah but what about Windows Explorer? They've been passively blocking SMB access forever at this point (by disallowing ports below 1024).
I would not be surprised if Googlebook's file browser goes via the cloud.