Google's annual “Made by Google” hardware event took place early Tuesday, and since the corporate announced a lot, quite a lot of it got lost in the push. We've rounded up a number of the more interesting AI-related announcements that didn't get much attention, just like the image-generating Pixel Studio and Pixel Screenshots, which helps save and organize information in screenshots.
Call Notes summarizes your conversations
For people like this creator with short-term memory problems, call reminders could possibly be a useful feature.
Available on the Pixel 9 family of devices, Call Notes saves a summary of your conversation after a call. The details – and a transcript – are stored in your phone's call log.
If that appears like a possible privacy nightmare, you're not flawed. Google says Call Notes runs entirely on the device and notifies everyone on the decision when recording is in progress – but we'll have to depart that to the safety experts.
Pixel Studio is a brand new app for image generation
Pixel Studio, exclusive to Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, is a picture generation app powered by each a generative AI model on the device and Google's Imagen 3 model running within the cloud. With Pixel Studio, you possibly can type in prompts to generate whatever moves you creatively, add stickers, and make edits and changes after the actual fact.
Creations from Pixel Studio – which requires a stable web connection to make use of despite the on-device component – will be shared with contacts via Google Messages.
Google's PR department told my colleague Ivan Mehta that Pixel Studio cannot yet generate human faces, presumably attributable to Gemini's unlucky slip-ups earlier this yr. However, the spokesperson didn’t say whether there are other safeguards in place to forestall the app from generating potentially harmful images.
Pixel screenshots are searchable
If you're anything like me, you are taking tons of screenshots of things – tickets, QR codes, boarding passes, whatever – for easy accessibility later. But screenshots aren't exactly search-friendly. And that makes them an actual pain while you're trying to search out something specific.
Luckily for future Pixel 9 owners, there's Pixel Screenshots, a brand new app that uses AI to investigate the contents of screenshots, including any text, people, and objects captured. Google Photos already did this – but Pixel Screenshots works locally.
Google gives this vivid example: “Let's say your squirrel-loving friend has a birthday coming up. You may be browsing Google Chrome for a present for him and taking screenshots of squirrel shirts, squirrel coasters, and the rest squirrel-related that you think that he might like. Pixel Screenshots analyzes the content of all those images and makes the data searchable for you within the app. So all you might have to do is open the app and seek for 'squirrel' and people results will appear. Even higher, it would show links to where you found the whole lot and a summary of what you're with relevant information.”
Pixel Screenshots also helpfully searches photos for things like door codes and addresses.
