[HN Gopher] Chrome experimental AI features
___________________________________________________________________
Chrome experimental AI features
Author : mleroy
Score : 92 points
Date : 2024-01-23 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| seydor wrote:
| what i want is 'read aloud', like MS Edge
| TOMDM wrote:
| Edge is honestly slowly turning into a better Chrome, and the
| better parts aren't even the LLM craze.
|
| If they keep it up, this might actually threaten Googles
| browser dominance.
|
| On the AI end though Microsoft aggresively pursues support for
| other AI providers (Mistral and Lamma both being on Azure API's
| now), Google tying themselves to Gemini seems to be tying
| themselves to the best they can do while Microsoft seems to be
| accruing the best they can get.
| lxgr wrote:
| Serious question: What do you like about Edge?
|
| I've tried it a couple of times (when Bing AI chat was still
| Edge-only) and was extremely put off by all the coupons,
| rewards, and other distractions.
| TOMDM wrote:
| Read aloud and Web captures are great.
|
| I'm not daily driving Edge yet, but I do use it now and
| then and have been positively surprised a couple times.
| Solvency wrote:
| It's absolutely wild that this isn't the first thing anyone
| would make there. ChatGPTs talk mode is so good, I'd kill for
| the ability to listen to longform articles at varying
| speeds/voices.
| lulzx wrote:
| Again features nobody cares about
| izolate wrote:
| The first two are seemingly of questionable utility, but the 3rd
| feature (Help me write) is actually quite interesting.
|
| As of late, most of my public written responses (bar HN) have had
| some sort of collaboration with ChatGPT, and I've often wondered
| about a native browser integration. For those of us who struggle
| with communication, this is an exciting prospect!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I suck at plenty of things and when there is software (or
| another tool) to help me, I am happy to use it. Software that
| helps with communication, at least on this level, is a new
| frontier and therefore, as always, people feel a lot of
| uncertainty.
|
| As someone who seriously utilizes this particular tool, what do
| you think of those issues? For example, do you feel like the
| result has your own voice? Your own specific, precise thoughts?
| Does it help or hurt growth in communication skill? How do
| those things play out in real application of the technology and
| what is the best way to use it?
|
| Incidentally, communication is a strong point for me and
| therefore ChatGPT doesn't benefit me much in that respect. I
| hate to think that my skill has lost most of its value, but
| working in technology, I can hardly complain when it happens to
| me: Are communication skills even needed now, or how has that
| need changed?
| summerlight wrote:
| I see this may be a good replacement for general autofill
| features as well. Seemingly simple autofill tasks like filling
| e-mail, address, name, country etc... fields never "just works"
| for almost all sites since this relies on correctness of the
| target page implementation and devs usually never care of it.
| Large language models should be better on this task.
| worksonmine wrote:
| You don't need an LLM to figure out what a certain field is.
| It's like choosing the 18 wheeler to drive your kids to
| school...
| smith7018 wrote:
| I'm on the other end of the spectrum; I'm pretty worried that
| that feature will make it really easy to automate bot comments
| in-browser. It's sad that the internet as we knew it 3 years
| ago is gone forever and changes like this to push some team's
| OKRs means I won't be able to trust more online comments.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| The Internet 3 years ago? Was that Internet that great?
| smith7018 wrote:
| No but it was (mostly) filled with real people. Sure there
| was a GPT3-generated article or two but they were pretty
| easy to spot.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Ironically, the message "I'm interested in this place - do you
| allow dogs?" is a piece of decent business writing on its own
| and way better than anything I saw while trying to sublet a
| room. I would rather see AI suggest phrases like that rather
| than their proposed answer.
|
| Now that I think about it, a Clippy that interviews you about
| needs and follows your browsing session to highlight stuff you
| like / don't like and propose questions to ask would be pretty
| sweet.
| burkaman wrote:
| Yeah that suggestion is terrible. Really not looking forward
| to seeing this kind of writing everywhere.
| bogtog wrote:
| Is there any good AI autocomplete tool out there? The only LLM
| tool I like currently is GitHub copilot. I basically want
| copilot for gmail + MS word, but every product I've found wants
| me to prompt an AI.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Gmail already has content-based autocomplete. The feature is
| called Smart Compose:
| https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9116836?hl=en
|
| I also find the UX much better than typical LLMs that require
| you to write a prompt first; it simply suggests continuations
| of your sentences that you can accept or ignore, without
| requiring you to switch your mind between writing for your
| intended email recipient and writing a prompt for the LLM.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I find it the exact opposite. Writing is joyful to me, whether
| I'm writing a short one-paragraph comment on HN or writing a
| thousand-word essay. I do not like the current crop of "Help me
| write" features because they take away the joy.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I have a chrome extension
| (https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/LookupChatGPT) where i just
| added in-place text replacement option. Right click your
| selected text and chose your own prompt to refine the text your
| way.
| int_19h wrote:
| I don't know. The screenshot that they use to showcase it makes
| me feel the opposite - it took a perfectly clear and concise
| question and dressed it up in a lot of unnecessary verbiage
| that the person on the other end will now have to unpack to get
| to the gist of it.
|
| Or they could use an LLM to translate it back to clear and
| concise, I suppose. But then what is it even for?
| cute_boi wrote:
| I don't want another microsoft edge where I have to press hundred
| buttons just to open website.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| What are you talking about?
| Hoefner wrote:
| I hope the Chrome devs will add some features like those in Arc
| browser, such as summarizing content while hovering over a link
| and pressing Shift.
| lukan wrote:
| That would be useful, but also probably quite expensive, if
| every chrome user use this feature?
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Not if inferencing happens locally, e.g. with Gemini Nano.
| summerlight wrote:
| Should be doable with a local model, but there might be some
| trade-off here. I expect it to roll out to Pixel users first
| where Google has a better control.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Desktop users are not going to be happy about a surprise
| local model running in the background, even a small
| quantized one.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I'm curious, why do you think that?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Because it seems like, regardless of the announcement,
| there will always be someone who has the most niche issue
| with it and manages to make assertions for an entire
| group of people while only really referencing their
| personal experience ("and all of the people they know").
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I mean, I am the strongest local LLM advocate you will
| find. I have my GPU loaded with a model pretty much all
| day, for recreation and work. My job, my livelihood
| involves running local LLMs.
|
| But it's _intense_ , even with a very finicky, efficient
| runtime on a strong desktop. Local LLM hosting is not
| something you want to impose on users unless they are
| _acutely_ aware of it, or unless its a full stack
| hardware /software platform (like the Google Pixel) where
| the vendor can "hide" the undesirable effects on system
| performance.
|
| I think that's a reasonable generalization to make.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Running "smart" LLMs locally takes a lot of RAM, a lot of
| compute, and a lot of disk space.
|
| It produces a considerable amount of heat unless it's run
| on an NPU, which basically doesn't happen on desktops at
| the moment.
|
| Hot loading/unloading it can be slow even on an SSD.
|
| Users often multitask with chrome in the background, and
| I think many would be very displeased to find Chrome
| bogging down their computer for reasons they may not be
| aware of.
|
| Theoretically Google could run a very small (less than
| 2B?) LLM with very fast quantization, and maybe even work
| out how to use desktop NPUs, but that would be one heck
| of an engineering feat to deploy on the scale of Chrome.
| chatmasta wrote:
| So don't make it a surprise then. Besides, I'd be much
| less happy about my post-authenticated content being sent
| to a surprise cloud model...
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I hope the Arc Browser team makes their Chromium based project
| as cross-platform as Chromium itself.
| summerlight wrote:
| As a tab hoarder, I remember there were some attempts to
| implement rule-based tab organizer (using features like tab name,
| url, etc...) but most of them were only marginally useful for my
| case.
|
| I wondered if generative models make any differences here so just
| tried it and a bit disappointed, it's consistently returning an
| error with a message "Tab groups suggestions are currently
| unavailable". It's just launched and the team might be
| experiencing lots of pages, perhaps I should try this again
| later.
| punkspider wrote:
| How did you use it? I'm trying with Chrome Beta but it doesn't
| seem to have the option to organize tabs.
|
| I looked in Experiments and it's not there either.
|
| It's updated to the latest version.
| summerlight wrote:
| https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14519765?visit_id=6.
| ..
|
| AFAIK, this is geo limited to the US, at least for now.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Meanwhile I keep refreshing the Google Bard changelog site,
| waiting for Gemini Pro in Europe.
| esha_manideep wrote:
| Having a feature to summarise the website would be a much better
| than the first two. As I constantly find myself wishing for such
| a feature :/
| renewiltord wrote:
| The Arc browser I use has that feature on hover.
| jsf01 wrote:
| I've been working on a project [1] to do just that from within
| a Chrome extension. The idea was that as an extension, it could
| make use of the context menu and feel more like a native
| feature of the browser. I'm always hesitant to link to my
| things from comments but in this case I think it's a perfect
| fit for what you're describing.
|
| [1] https://smudge.ai
| worksonmine wrote:
| Anyone else have AI fatigue yet? I haven't even tried GPT and I'm
| already sick of AI this LLM that.
| danielbln wrote:
| You haven't tried what would only be called science fiction 4
| years ago but are tired of it? The hype machine is grating, but
| do try a Gen AI model. I use it for code, for ideation, for
| various NLP tasks. It's at the very least moderately useful in
| various tasks, and extremely useful in some.
|
| edit: tone
| worksonmine wrote:
| I get what it does, I've seen demos and it is no doubt
| impressive, but I have no personal use and don't see the
| point of giving them any data. I'm not limited in my current
| workflow and prefer official docs over the LLM interpretation
| of those same docs. The real satire are all the comments on
| any problem asking "have you tried GPT", more annoying than
| the Rust community.
|
| What do you use it for that you think would benefit me?
| The_Colonel wrote:
| One example for which I use ChatGPT is tip of the tongue. I
| can't remember a word, but I can describe it in other ways.
| Google doesn't catch on those keywords, ChatGPT does.
|
| It's also pretty good for generating pointers for a complex
| solution. Like I try to figure out something in the non-JPA
| old version of EclipseLink, so I ask ChatGPT. The generated
| code is very often wrong, but it often points me into a
| right direction.
| mattigames wrote:
| The only AI feature I'm interested its an AI that lets me remove
| ads automatically, but Google by definition its not interested in
| such feature.
| rockooooo wrote:
| AI theme generation really seems like a solution looking for a
| problem
| voidhorse wrote:
| The vast majority of AI development right now fits the solution
| looking for a problem mold. People are pushing hard for the
| adoption of LLMs in areas where the existing solutions are not
| only more predictable, but require equivalent or less effort to
| using an LLM.
|
| At some point the hype will die down and we'll find out where
| these tools actually fit, but yeah right now it's madness.
| duxup wrote:
| It is a neat "it can do that" kinda thing but I also wondered
| when I need that.
|
| Having said that chrome customization has always kinda bit me
| in the butt eventually when something changes and looks odd now
| and ... I just tend to avoid it altogether now.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Yeah honestly I just want my browser to be dark and not spam me
| with stuff when I open a new tab. I don't need some fancy
| picture.
| yanis_t wrote:
| Here are some better ideas from the top of my head:
|
| - summarise an article
|
| - find information on a given topic (free-form input text)
|
| - full voice control ("click that link", "read that article",
| "find this")
|
| - auto-submit a captcha
| marricks wrote:
| Seriously, their first example seems useless to most people.
| Naming a tab group??? That doesn't take any time, little
| thought, and who does that regularly?
|
| Summarizing an article seems like something everyone else can
| do OK. It's a huge avenue for bias (maybe that's why it's
| reasonably elided) but at least it's actually useful.
| summerlight wrote:
| It's not just naming, but grouping as well. If you have 200
| tabs and don't want to spend too much time on it, this can be
| very helpful.
| fullstop wrote:
| How long until malicious pages fool this into placing
| themselves into, say, a banking tab group?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| How would that affect the end user except they go into
| the banking tab group and go "Huh. This isn't a banking
| website" and close it?
| fullstop wrote:
| There are already phishing websites which copy the look
| of the real website, and a user could easily mix the two
| up.
| jprete wrote:
| Tab groups are a mental shortcut so you can spend less
| time figuring out the nature of the tab you're looking at
| or finding particular tabs.
|
| If something automates their creation then there is
| absolutely an advantage to sites that can subvert the
| classification method, because users will start with the
| "banking site" expectation instead of no expectation at
| all.
| Hoefner wrote:
| Maybe they are just testing AI with less used features first
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is the only feature I'm excited about. I perpetually
| have 100+ tabs opened and have tried tab groups but
| eventually things get disorganized again. The ability to
| automatically group similar tabs, assuming it works, is going
| to be game changing.
| kuhewa wrote:
| > Seriously, their first example seems useless to most
| people. Naming a tab group??? That doesn't take any time,
| little thought, and who does that regularly?
|
| Funny, naming things, whether variables or groups of things
| is the main reason I use LLMs to date. Add in grouping as
| well and that handles something that puts me under a lot of
| cognitive load, because I can never shake the feeling I have
| ot yet manually grouped things optimally.
| rschiavone wrote:
| > "auto-submit a captcha"
|
| we have come full circle
| crummy wrote:
| well, they're too hard for me to solve on my own
| kuhewa wrote:
| When I am prompted to 'try again' with a new 3x3 of low-res
| images I often wonder if there was a bit of 'crosswalk' I
| missed in one, or if this is just how they get me to
| annotate another set for 'bicycles' for free.
| LtWorf wrote:
| When they decide I'm a bot and just give me the low res
| stuff I give up accessing the website.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Watch an ad so i don't have to
| ehsankia wrote:
| 1. This is actually a feature on Pixel through the assistant
| [0], surprised it's not on Chrome itself
|
| 2. That doesn't really seem like a Chrome feature? Belongs more
| on Bard.
|
| 3. That seems like a Google Assistant feature too, some of that
| actually may work on a pixel phone, though might be nice to
| have on desktop too.
|
| 4. Will never happen. Google themselves have a captcha product
| so defeats the point.
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/14163109?hl=en
| mderazon wrote:
| I was excited to test it on my pixel 7 just to find out it's
| only available on Pixel 8. Why?....
| addandsubtract wrote:
| ...and only in the US.
| jtolmar wrote:
| I think for #2, they meant like AI-powered control-F / find
| in page.
|
| Which is actually the first non-novelty AI tool I've heard
| someone pitch that actually sounded like a good idea. Way
| more visible failure mode than summarizing.
| kuhewa wrote:
| > 1. This is actually a feature on Pixel through the
| assistant [0], surprised it's not on Chrome itself
|
| It is only on the Pixel 8, not the previous models and their
| mid-range $ variants so they aren't giving it away for free
| just yet
| ehsankia wrote:
| I wonder if it's done locally or through the cloud. Some of
| the language around the release of Gemini Nano implies that
| it may be done locally?
|
| https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-
| featur...
| bane wrote:
| Take this tab collection, build a model or a RAG or whatever
| around them:
|
| - Let me chat with a bot that knows the information from the
| collection
|
| - Use the information to generate a summary
|
| - Let me guide it in generating a well sourced article
|
| Build a knowledge graph from the web
|
| - Trace a source of information back to the originating point
| to help eliminate derivative blog spam
|
| - Help moderate media bias and challenge echo chambers
|
| Automatically recognize spam, scams, etc.
|
| Let me describe something I need in text, return back links to
| shopping sites that sell that thing, if nobody has it, generate
| a 3d model, or more formal description of it and supply me with
| connections to let me farm it out to an additive manufacture,
| one-off makerspace place or something.
| rezonant wrote:
| - Post resulting article on your spam blog
|
| - The circle continues
| everdrive wrote:
| I don't want any AI features in anything. Yet another reason to
| avoid Chrome. I have Chrome installed solely to watch netflix on
| Linux.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Love the textarea integration. I wish Chrome could do a better
| job of saving "drafts" and/or backing up text somehow. Adding
| long content is a constant worry for me to lose it somehow to an
| error or accidentally closed tab.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Absolutely. For the longest time I had this extension called
| "Comment Save" which saved anything you typed in a textarea. It
| doesn't seem to exist anymore, and I haven't been able to find
| a good replacement. I would also much rather have it in the
| browser than giving full permission to some third party.
|
| The back button in Chrome sometimes help but I still lose long
| messages all the time.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| The last thing I want is further telemetry from Chrome to Google.
| I'm so glad I switched to Firefox. This should be an API, not a
| browser integration.
| crummy wrote:
| an API to group your browser tabs..?
| hoten wrote:
| Maybe they meant an extension API, not an external service.
| Communitivity wrote:
| I had a thought while reading this, and I don't know if this
| would be the case but...
|
| If it works by you hover over a link and Google gets the content
| in the browser behind the scenes and sends it to the mothership,
| where it's summarized and the summary then sent back to you to be
| displayed by the browser, then you may be accessing the linked
| page using your stored credentials, which give Google access to
| content they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
| lxgr wrote:
| The same is true for translations in most browsers, right? At
| least I'm not aware of any browser that does it client-
| side/offline.
|
| Edit: I stand corrected, Firefox does it offline! Thank you,
| Firefox team, this is awesome and I'll likely be using it more
| often now :)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Firefox does it offline
| burkaman wrote:
| Firefox does it locally: https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/features/translate/
| lxgr wrote:
| Oh, cool! I somehow misremembered that very announcement as
| being cloud-based (but using an open model).
| asadotzler wrote:
| Firefox does local LLM based translation. I kicked that
| project off in 2022 and it shipped last year.
| host0 wrote:
| > Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox
| keeps your data safe on your device. There's no privacy risk
| of sending text to third parties for analysis because
| translation happens on your device, not externally.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
| comprev wrote:
| Sounds like a sneaky way to add your personal social media feed
| into their AI training data.
|
| Edit: the suggestion that translation functionality already
| does this is valid though perhaps this expands the scope to
| data in the users default language?
| smusamashah wrote:
| I have a chrome extension [1] which lets you re-write your
| selected text, or look-it up via ChatGPT using _your own custom
| prompts_. Gives you more control on what kind of suggestions or
| answers you want basically.
|
| Won't help with rearranging/grouping tabs, but can definitely
| help rephrase text in input fields or looking up info.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/LookupChatGPT
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I really wish the first part of this article had an explicit
| "Here is how you get started" section. I just about missed it
| because it's a paragraph that links to a support article. If they
| want people to actually use this stuff, why not make turning it
| on front and center?
| butz wrote:
| Soon you won't need to browse the web at all, Chrome will do
| everything for you: watch youtube ads, click on sponsored links,
| write positive reviews for restaurants buying ads from adsense,
| and write negative reviews for ones not advertising with google,
| fight with edge which browser is the default one. On the bright
| side, you will be able to enjoy more time offline.
| bradgessler wrote:
| I look forward to AI blocking ads after it gets tired of
| clicking through all of them.
| disqard wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of Douglas Adams' Electric Monk:
|
| "The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a
| dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious
| dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them
| yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you,
| thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric
| Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was
| becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all
| the things the world expected you to believe."
| shipit1999 wrote:
| I switched to Brave. Slowly trying to get the number of Google
| products I use down to zero.
| gr__or wrote:
| Kind of amazing how unable to deliver Google seems to be here.
| Looking at Arc, a new player, and the kind of AI features they
| came up with, this here looks more like features developed by
| McKinsey rather than by someone with domain knowledge.
| ncann wrote:
| The only "AI feature" I use in Chrome is the live caption one for
| French (which requires Chrome Canary). I use it to get automatic
| live caption while listening to French podcast since I'm learning
| the language. It's buggy as hell though, so if anyone has a
| suggestion on a replacement that would be much appreciated!
| littlekey wrote:
| Anyone else think the whole idea of "tab management" tools is
| crazy? The way to manage tabs is to close them.
| pixelbath wrote:
| And if you'd like to read it later, bookmark it! You can
| organize bookmarks into groups, give them custom names, and
| they don't require the browser to be constantly hoarding
| multiple gigabytes of RAM.
| layer8 wrote:
| Or filtering and searching. Anything you can have a large
| number of should have an obvious filtering & searching UI.
| After how many decades of UI are we still so behind on basic
| usability design.
| dougb5 wrote:
| I wonder if this "Help me write" will give different suggestions
| from the Google Docs "Help me write" feature, or from the dozens
| of other help-me-write features that are cropping up these days
| within text-oriented webapps (e.g. Notion).
| Imnimo wrote:
| This feels like a VP at Google told the Chrome team they needed
| more AI.
| albert180 wrote:
| Another reason to use Firefox
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