Google’s new feature to summarise entire articles for you using generative AI

The feature is designed to work "only on articles that are freely available to the public on the web

San Francisco: Google‘s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature, which will summarise articles for users while reading on the web.

Currently, the feature — “SGE while browsing” is in the experiment phase. “When you’re trying to understand the ins and outs of a new topic, you often need to digest long or complex web pages, and its not always easy to hone in on specific details.

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So starting today, we’re launching an early experiment in Search Labs called “SGE while browsing”, available in the Google app on Android and iOS, and coming to Chrome on desktop in the days ahead,” Google said in a blogpost on Tuesday. If users have access to the Google app on mobile, the company will pull up AI-generated “key points” from an article when they tap the icon at the bottom. The feature is designed to work “only on articles that are freely available to the public on the web”, however, the company said that the feature won’t work with websites that publishers mark as paywalled. Google is also making a number of other enhancements to SGE.

Google said that users will be able to hover over specific words in the SGE results for a search query about topics like science, economics, and history to get definitions or diagrams about a topic. The tech giant is also making it easier to understand SGE’s coding information summaries. “Whether you’re a new or experienced programmer, learning more about coding is probably on your running to-do list, and generative AI can be a helpful tool. Starting today, we’ll add new capabilities to SGE so its easier to understand and debug generated code,” Google said.

Meanwhile, Google seems to be working on an artificial intelligence (AI) writing and editing feature for Chromebooks. The tech giant is actively working on a project that has at least five codenames associated with it, with the main three being “Orca”, “Mako” and “Manta”, reports 9To5Google.