incoming Various Pixel 9 phones and Pixel 9 Pro folding screen Will Take advantage of artificial intelligence capabilities. Among all the Magic Editor and Gemini mumbo jumbo, one AI feature that stands out is an application for storing screenshots. Pixel Screenshots is an app exclusive to Google phones that lets you search for screenshots with the help of artificial intelligence. After watching it in action I view it as a simplified version Microsoft’s much-criticized recall featurewait, everything gets better.
My screenshots are like barnacles clinging to the Google Photos app I organize. I think of screen captures as everything I need to remember about events, notes, and receipts. I could remove them from the photo, but that means I might miss something I need later. Pixel Screenshots solves this problem by providing specific apps to search for my screenshots. This feature uses Gemini Nano to recognize text and understand images in apps. If I ask it to search for how much money my friend owed me last night, it should be able to extract that information.
Google told Gizmodo that the entire process runs on the device and doesn’t require any cloud-based work. Every time you take a screenshot, the application generates a title and summary of the image. You can add annotations to your screenshots to help AI-enhanced search find your content. Best of all, you can create categories for various screenshots.
How do Pixel screenshots differ from Microsoft’s recall?
When Microsoft shares Recall details for The first wave of Copilot+ computers Earlier this year, it caught the attention of privacy-conscious consumers. Some people are hesitant to buy a computer because, right from the start, the computer will start taking screenshots of everything they do on it (including passwords and financial information) every few seconds and then store it in on the drive. Microsoft This feature was removed from the initial release Copilot+ was canceled after researchers found that the screenshots were easily accessible without any real layer of security.
Both Google and Microsoft claim that all AI screenshot analysis happens on the device, whether it’s Recall or Pixel Screenshots. The nice thing about Google is that users can choose what to screenshot and when. It also works with other Google apps. If it finds a date or location in the screenshot, I can click a button to add the location to the map or the event to the calendar.
Memories should be your always-on memory machine when you forget what you were looking for the other day. But this feature automatically takes up your storage space and fills it with junk screenshots. Microsoft promises that the feature won’t be enabled by default once they finally bring it to Copilot+, but I’m still hesitant to allow it for fear that it will pick up some sensitive information as I scroll.
Pixel phones will still save your screenshots to Google Photos, at least for now. My photos are for the experience and my screenshots are useful for technical journalists, so I like to keep them separate if possible. We’ll need to use the app more ourselves to provide a full impression, but for now, it’s a much better use of AI’s capabilities than boring AI-generated text or awkward, inane AI art one.
