7 ms·

Google seems to have made an official post on Reddit describing the feature set in detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducing_google

by achow 4mo 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/introducing_googlebook_a_new_category_of_laptops/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb8xls/introducin... [Edit] And, the feature set references the 'AI mouse pointer' from this Deepmind blog.. https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/ https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/

somebehemoth 4mo ago
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.
varenc 4mo ago
Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error? ...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)... `[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_android_smarter_and_more_proactive_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...
- entropicdrifter 4mo ago
  Looks like the link got fixed. I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.
- vages 4mo ago
  TKTK is a common placeholder for something that should be filled in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)
- robotresearcher 4mo ago
  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.
sunaookami 4mo ago
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.
- WarmWash 4mo ago
  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.
dhosek 4mo ago
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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
  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.
  - unholiness 4mo ago
    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.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
      I'm not sure if that's an option for me, since I'm not using the regular camera app - I'm using Halide which is better suited to macro (coin) photography. Google Drive would be another option to transfer, but would be more work (about same to "share" as email, but less convenient to access on desktop). The e-mail way is actually quite convenient since on the desktop you can just download all the photos you sent in one go - they appear as a zip file that you can then just extract to your working directory, rather than having to save one at a time.
      - projektfu 4mo ago
deckar01 4mo ago
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.
- paxys 4mo ago
  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.
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  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.
  - bel8 4mo ago
    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".
    - jeroenhd 4mo ago
      Their video is completely different from what Gemini does now. It analyses mouse movements, like circling around things, underlining things with the mouse, pointing at things to indicate where they need to go. It's a lot like the interfaces you might see in sci-fi movies, where generic gestures are understood within context in a way that modern computers can't handle.
IshKebab 4mo ago
> 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.
nmeagent 4mo ago
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.
pimlottc 4mo ago
“Hey google, do something with this. Huh, I guess that’s fine.”
- dormento 4mo ago
  Yeah... "Google, please do the thinking for me, it hurts!" :( May chaos take the world!
pharos92 4mo ago
"We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks." A disaster from the first step.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
utopiah 4mo ago
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.
mFixman 4mo ago
> 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.
getpokedagain 4mo ago
Is magic pointer a joke. That's what the right button has been for for ages.

by achow 4mo ago

somebehemoth 4mo ago

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.

varenc 4mo ago

Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error? ...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)... `[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_android_smarter_and_more_proactive_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...

entropicdrifter 4mo ago
Looks like the link got fixed. I'm really enjoying reddit just completely roasting the entire concept in the comments.
vages 4mo ago
TKTK is a common placeholder for something that should be filled in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_(publishing)
robotresearcher 4mo ago
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.

sunaookami 4mo ago

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.

WarmWash 4mo ago
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.

dhosek 4mo ago

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.

HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
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.
- unholiness 4mo ago
  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.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
    I'm not sure if that's an option for me, since I'm not using the regular camera app - I'm using Halide which is better suited to macro (coin) photography. Google Drive would be another option to transfer, but would be more work (about same to "share" as email, but less convenient to access on desktop). The e-mail way is actually quite convenient since on the desktop you can just download all the photos you sent in one go - they appear as a zip file that you can then just extract to your working directory, rather than having to save one at a time.
    - projektfu 4mo ago

deckar01 4mo ago

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.

paxys 4mo ago
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.
jeroenhd 4mo ago
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.
- bel8 4mo ago
  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".
  - jeroenhd 4mo ago
    Their video is completely different from what Gemini does now. It analyses mouse movements, like circling around things, underlining things with the mouse, pointing at things to indicate where they need to go. It's a lot like the interfaces you might see in sci-fi movies, where generic gestures are understood within context in a way that modern computers can't handle.

IshKebab 4mo ago

> 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.

nmeagent 4mo ago

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.

pimlottc 4mo ago

“Hey google, do something with this. Huh, I guess that’s fine.”

dormento 4mo ago
Yeah... "Google, please do the thinking for me, it hurts!" :( May chaos take the world!

pharos92 4mo ago

"We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks." A disaster from the first step.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

utopiah 4mo ago

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.

mFixman 4mo ago

> 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.

getpokedagain 4mo ago

Is magic pointer a joke. That's what the right button has been for for ages.