Chromebooks have AI too. Google’s recent comments on its AI advances arrived between Microsoft’s big Copilot+ announcement and the forthcoming Apple AI news. In addition to outlining a few new AI features that are now available for Google’s Chromebook Plus line of laptops, Google previewed a fascinating feature coming later that would let you control the entirety of your Chromebook with just your face.
Using computer vision and the webcam built into your Chromebook, you’ll soon be able to talk to it, move your face, and make hand gestures to control your Chromebook. Google calls it Project Gameface, and it’s being built right into ChromeOS. The feature was originally announced via a blog post on May 10, and is aimed at creating a “hands-free, AI-powered gaming mouse,” but now it’s being expanded and is officially coming to Chromebooks.
In settings, you can set specific head movements and facial gestures captured from the camera to do things like left click, reset the cursor to center, scroll with the mouse, activate the keyboard, and more. The types of facial gestures you can use, meanwhile, include opening your mouth, smiling, looking in different directions, or raising the eyebrows. You can even customize a “gesture size,” to be even more inclusive of the specific needs of users.
Google admits that it’s still “early in this project,” so we don’t yet know when this feature will roll out.
Interestingly, Apple recently announced eye tracking for the iPad as a similar way to improve accessibility and allow for a more hands-free ways of interacting with devices.
Beyond updates to Project Gameface, Google has announced it’s also working on a few other upcoming AI features. With Gemini right on the device, you’ll soon be able to do live translate and transcriptions from videos and video calls. Gemini will also be able to do something called “Help me read and understand,” which is a way of getting summaries of or asking questions about particular articles or pages. Lastly, you’ll be able to log into your Chromebook and get prompted to pick things up where you left off, with all opened apps and websites grouped together just as they were in just one click.
These new features would, in theory, need to be run on a device’s neural processing unit (NPU), which very few new Chromebooks actually have.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.