Hands-on: Chromebook Plus is Google’s push for affordable AI

Did you know that computers have artificial intelligence now? You didn’t? How’s that? We’ve been subjected to an absolute avalanche of marketing touting AI from seemingly every tech company, from Microsoft and Nvidia to laptop makers and even thermal paste sellers. Well if you’ve somehow avoided the AI blitz, possibly by using a Chromebook, you’re about to get it in spades from Google.

The company has been pushing its Gemini (nee Bard) AI tools into most of its high-profile products, most notably Chrome and Android. Now Chromebook Plus, Google’s higher tier of ChromeOS laptops revealed last year, are slated to be Google’s flagship platform for the best and brightest of Gemini, with a few tools and options that aren’t available elsewhere.

With all this coming just a week after Microsoft’s big push for Copilot+ hardware, its own brand of devices that can access its cutting-edge generative AI tools, it’s hard to see this as anything but Google and Microsoft squaring up for a good old-fashioned tech race. (That’s not even mentioning Google’s all-AI, all-the-time I/O presentation.) While there’s a lot of crossover between Copilot and Gemini, Google is highlighting that its tools will be available at a far lower entry price — just $350 for the cheapest Chromebooks that meet the Plus designation, and come with a year of premium AI features for free.

What features? Let’s break it down. These tools are spread out within the Chromebook Plus interface, or available as more of a standard chat prompt by clicking the Gemini button on the task bar.

‘Help me write’ text generation

This will surely be the big draw if you’re convinced of AI’s power to save you time on office-style work. Gemini’s text-based prompts aren’t doing anything that we haven’t seen before with Copilot and similar systems, but it is surprisingly fast, and available just about everywhere that the Chrome browser is, plus all of the slightly skinned web apps in ChromeOS. Users can give direct prompts for text generation, modify existing text (like “make this headline shorter”), or choose from a quick list of auto-generated suggestions.

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Trying this out in person was impressive in terms of speed, but had the usual hiccups that generative AI users might be accustomed to at this point. Getting Gemini to give me a PowerPoint (or Google Slides) presentation on a specific topic was easy, but I still needed to go through it, touch things up, and cut out some irrelevant info. It certainly saved a lot of time, if not to the magical degree that Google’s presentation promised.

Magic Editor for Google Photos

Owners of Google’s Pixel phones have had access to some of these advanced photo editing tools for some time now, and they’re coming to Chromebook Plus owners now. These are particularly impressive once you bring them to a bigger screen, with the ability to move, resize, and otherwise gently alter objects (including people) and automatically adjust the rest of the image to match.

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As someone who’s been a Photoshop jockey for decades, the system’s ability to quickly select relevant objects and accurately fill in backgrounds was impressive. Even though I can do this stuff myself, the Magic Editor does it 10 times faster and without any immediately obvious artifacts. Since I use Windows for my work machine, I’m genuinely jealous that this won’t be available outside of Chromebook Plus devices.

AI-generated wallpaper and video call backgrounds

These are some interesting options, but by far the least useful of Google’s demonstrations. The Chromebook interface will allow Plus users to input prompts for AI-generated wallpaper for free. This seems like something that’s done so infrequently that it’s kind of an afterthought for Google’s big-iron AI systems, but what the hey, everybody wants cool-looking wallpaper.

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The video backgrounds are perhaps more relevant to everyday use. The same system will let you generate backgrounds that will appear behind you in video conferencing, no greenscreen required. The generation is the new thing here — pretty much every video chat system will give you the option to set a custom background. But Google representatives did say that this tool is platform-agnostic — it’ll work fine on browser-based Zoom or Teams running in ChromeOS, as well as Google Meet.

2TB of cloud storage and Gemini Advanced for a year

Android phones and Chromebooks have often come with freebies from Google — a current promotion will give you 100GB of Google One storage and three months of YouTube Premium for any Chromebook purchase, for example. If you buy a Chromebook Plus model starting today, you get 12 months of free access to the Google One AI tier