Confirmed by Google: Android is moving into a new direction

This week’s edition is a special one: Chai with Android 17. Nothing major happened in the AI space last week that would help individual users except for the announcement of Android 17.

Google held ‘The Android Show: I/O Edition’ last week and announced new features and products. There are some caveats to these announcements, which we’ll cover at the end. But first, let's dive into the highlights:

Currently on Android, sharing context between apps is entirely manual. For example, if I message my friend the location and time of our meeting on Signal, my friend will have to copy that from Signal and paste that to his Calendar app.

In the upcoming days, AI will be able to use context from one app and use that agentically in other apps. Google showcased a few examples, like asking AI to check your notes and pick grocery items from that, search for the same items in the shopping app, and put them in the cart.

The current implementation of autofill generally uses your names, addresses, email addresses, etc. But Google announced that it will move Android autofill from pre-defined databases to something more dynamic that can get context from your documents and apps as well. For example, when filling out a web form, you will be able to ask the autofill to grab your photo from your Google Drive and paste that into the form.

Not all AI-related features in Android and Chrome Browser will depend on cloud-based AI models. Some of the features will be handled by Google’s on-device generative model. The most capable of the Gemini Nano series will be Google Nano v3, which’d handle a text-to-text and image-to-text inference speed of 940 tokens/second. Now we know why Google DeepMind has been putting so much effort into smaller models.

No, I am not talking about Google Books, which is a Google product related to digital books. Googlebooks is a new line of AI-first laptops.

The company is moving on from ChromeOS and Chromebook, and shifting to a new operating system featuring workflows designed entirely around AI. The new OS is expected to be a mix of the Android mobile stack and the ChromeOS desktop interface.

We know that Chromebooks were a good choice for students who had browser-centric workflows and could replace local files and apps with cloud files and web apps. How Googlebooks differ from this is not yet clear. Someone can argue that this is an exact parallel of what Microsoft did with its pivot to AI with Copilot-OS aka Windows 11.

In the current AI paradigm, the user types out text or uploads a picture to an AI model to give context. But Google announced something called a Magic Pointer that replaces the current paradigm by understanding exactly what your cursor is pointing at to get relevant context.

The user will be able to turn on the feature by wiggling the cursor. Once the Magic Pointer is on, it will have the location data of the cursor, the semantic understanding of what it is pointing to, and the user's voice prompt.

This model of context providing sounds like a hybrid of Chrome and Firefox, in which we can highlight text and ask related questions, and the AI-native browsers like Comet and ChatGPT Atlas.

Apps like Wisprflow and Handy are quite popular and can handle voice-to-text dictation very well. Google finally remembered it has Gboard that can be used to dominate the voice-to-text market. So, it has introduced Gboard Rambler.

Rambler will not only filter out filler words, such as "um," "ah," and "you know," but it’ll also process self-correcting sentences. For example, if I say, “Let’s start tomorrow by 8 o’clock, or rather, 9 o’clock.” Google Rambler will process it as “Let’s start tomorrow by 9 o’clock.” Neat.

If you’ve been following the world of agentic AI, you probably already know what Model Context Protocol or MCP is. If you don’t, it’s like an API for AI agents to look into the backend servers. Android is getting an MCP of its own, and it will be called AppFunctions.

Up until now, most AI agents interacted with apps by taking screenshots of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and processing those screenshots. But that is a solution by brute force. AppFunctions, like MCP, will be a more reliable and elegant alternative to the fragile screen-scraping techniques.

There are more announcements, but I didn’t find them interesting.

At last comes the reality check. These announcements are mere announcements. We don’t know which of them will turn into real features and products at what point in time. And even if they do turn into reality, we don’t know if the implementation will be good enough or not. Let’s not get hyped until we get high-quality software and hardware in our hands.