Google’s New Pixel Screenshots Might Be the Feature That Finally Makes Me Switch to AI

According to the gallery app on my phone, I have 361 screenshots saved, including payment reports, important dates, memes, and web articles that I always want to revisit but don’t trust my browser to bookmark. If you asked me to find a specific image in the album, you’d have to give me a minute. Maybe longer.

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In theory, Google’s new Pixel Screenshots feature should speed up that process. Now, I can just type in a keyword or question like “Con Edison bill for September” or “Which stadium is hosting next week’s football game?” and my phone will autofill the most relevant screenshots. It works like magic. Or, I should say, it works like Artificial Intelligence.

The AI ​​part of Pixel Screenshots fits what I call the “old definition” more than the new definition, meaning it’s more about automated backend processing than content generation. You’re not redefining images here, creating new emojis, or generating captions for images; instead, Pixel 9Gemini Nano will extract as much information as possible from the screenshot, store it, and then retrieve it when requested.

The entire Pixel Screenshots process happens on the device, so the internet and all its dangers are irrelevant when using the feature. Google told me it plans to keep it that way for security and privacy reasons (read: the company wants to avoid a situation like Microsoft recall disaster), and I’m glad about that.

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Besides taking more screenshots than I probably should have — because it much It’s easier to press two buttons at once than it is to download an entire web page or save a URL to a notebook — I often don’t think about how much personal information is captured in the frame. Scrolling through my phone’s album of screenshots reveals my home address, the usernames of close friends and family, contact numbers, and other bits of information I don’t want falling into the wrong hands. I digress.

From my brief demo of Pixel Screenshots, I was most impressed by three things: the speed at which the phone pulls up image results (since it all works locally), the ability to upload and capture multiple images for future retrieval, and how seamlessly the feature works with natural behavior. On that last point, you don’t have to consciously label or manually transfer screenshots for it to work; everything you capture flows automatically into the dedicated app.

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Some of the smaller details that tell me how much thought is put into Pixel Screenshots, like the ability to quickly launch the URL where the image was captured in Chrome or YouTube, and the option to set a reminder when you first take a screenshot. This seems like a bigger deal than just a storage feature; it has the potential to change the way we interact with and mark up digital content.

At a time when smartphone makers are spending more time on AI features than camera hardware, Pixel Screenshots is a rare winner. I’m almost convinced by Google’s AI vision here, and that might be enough to lure me into the Gemini universe.