Google’s ace new Chromebook update brings these must-have features
Gemini AI comes to ChromeOS to sharpen up your writing skills
It’s not just a keen price that sees Chromebooks place near the top of any best budget laptop list. It’s the fact Google updates them every month – for free – and often with big new feature additions. Case in point: the Chromebook Plus range is in line for a bumper upgrade this month, with the firm’s Gemini AI taking centre stage.
First, a quick refresher. Chromebook Plus is Google’s new set of minimum specs that guarantees your laptop comes with a minimum of 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, a 1080p screen or higher, and at least an Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPU. That’s roughly twice the performance of a vanilla Chromebook, and enough oomph to run Google’s blend of on-device and cloud-based artificial intelligence – no expensive NPU co-processor required.
The star of May’s ChromeOS update is Gemini, Google’s home-grown AI model. It’s available right out of the box, letting you ask questions, get help with coding and explain tricky concepts in easy-to-understand terms right from the desktop.
Even better, new Chromebook Plus owners get twelve months of Google One AI Premium for free, including access to Gemini Advanced. This more complex AI can read and summarise documents, edit code written in the Python programming language, and generate results using the Gemini 1.5 Pro algorithm. The plan, which usually costs £19 a month, also comes with 2TB of cloud storage, and Nest Aware and Fitbit Premium subscriptions.
Another major addition, Help Me Write, also uses AI to give your social media writing a boost. Right click the text box on Facebook, LinkedIn or Reddit and it’ll give options to shorten, rephrase or formalise anything you’ve already written, or generate something fresh from a prompt. I tried it on single words to get synonyms, but it only works with a minimum of four words, and it doesn’t seem to work in other apps right now.
Chromebook Plus laptops can also now create generative AI wallpapers and video backgrounds. These work using the same setup as Android, with a limited set of prompts rather than a free-for-all image generator. Think “sand dunes in shades of pink” or “a glacial river in shades of blue and purple”. It creates more hits than misses, taking a matter of seconds to create eight small previews, and a few more to turn your favourite into a high-res image. The end results almost always have that noisy, artificial look I associate with AI-generated pics.
The last big add-on is Magic Editor for Google Photos. It’s the only way to use this one-time Pixel smartphone exclusive on a laptop, and has all the same object-deleting, resizing and colour-changing abilities. If you’re not a dab hand at Photoshop, it’s a fantastic way to tidy up otherwise messy shots filled with background distractions.
Google has snuck in plenty of little extras to this update, too. Google Tasks are now built into the desktop’s calendar widget, the screen capture tool can now create GIFs from recorded footage, and a new game dashboard can remap controls and record gameplay from GeForce Now streamed games and Play Store apps. Live Captions support heavy hitter apps including YouTube, Google Meet, Zoom and Teams, as well as Android streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+, albeit only in English for the time being.
The desktop Launcher’s search bar can now pick words out of images using optical character recognition (OCR), but only for your locally saved files – not ones on Google Drive or an external flash drive. Initial setup is far simpler now, too, as long as you have an Android phone to hand; scan an onscreen QR code and it’ll speed up the process by sharing info between devices.
Existing Chromebook Plus models, including the Acer Chromebook Plus 515 I reviewed earlier in the year, will get these additions as part of the May feature update, which is rolling out from today onwards. It’ll come as standard on all new Chromebook Plus laptops.
There will be four new Chromebook Plus models launched alongside the new Gemini-ready update. The HP Chromebook Plus 14, HP Chromebook Plus x360, Acer Chromebook Plus 514 and Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 714. The latter can even be had with an Intel Core Ultra 5 processor, which promises about as much power as you’ll find on any device running ChromeOS. Prices are expected to range from £379 to £799.
If that wasn’t enough to get you to convert to a Chromebook, Google has also teased a few further additions that’ll be landing later this year. Face and gesture tracking for hands-free control sounds genuinely useful for those with mobility issues, while Focus Mode will be handy for stopping distracting notifications when trying to get serious work done.
Help me Read uses Gemini to summarise websites and PDFs, then lets you ask follow-up questions all from a right-click menu.
I’m most excited by the new overview screen, which will show windows, tabs and apps from your last session the next time you boot up or log into your Chromebook, so you can pick up where you left off – even if it was on your Android phone first.
Tom Morgan-Freelander
Deputy Editor 
