Google Assistant could soon use AI to summarize long articles
Soon you could ask Google Assistant to automatically summarize almost any webpage. The latest Google app beta release shows the company's working on a generative AI feature for the best Android phones that would give users the TL;DR summary from walls of text with a simple voice command, 9to5 Google reports.
Tucked away in the latest Google app beta (version 14.29) is evidence that the voice assistant is set to receive a new "Summarize" suggestion button. The option would appear when users summon Assistant while browsing the web, or you can access it directly by asking "Hey Google, summarize this."
According to 9to5 Google, the Summarize prompt only seems to appear on web pages opened directly in Google Chrome or through a Custom Tab, which relies on Google's browser as well. It's also out of commission at the moment, which makes sense if Google's still testing it out, as Assistant only shows an error message when asked to summarize a page.
It's important to note that this feature is still very much in the works, and there's no guarantee that Google will ship it out. If it does roll out to the public, though, 9to5 Google speculates it could be exclusive to Google's own hardware. In the past, other Assistant features like Call Screen, Hold for Me and Quick Phrases have been limited to Pixel phones (and, now, the Pixel Tablet). So it stands to reason that Google would make Assistant's first generative AI feature a Pixel-exclusive as well.
Up to this point, Google has reserved generative AI-powered features for its ChatGPT rival, Google Bard, and Google Search. In March, Google announced plans for integrating its AI-powered chatbot into Google Docs and Gmail, allowing users to draft documents and email replies in seconds or summarize the contents of long email threads.
Open AI's wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT, rolled out a similar summary feature back in March. You can check it out either through Microsoft's new Bing with ChatGPT or OpenAI's own website.
