Google Chrome’s new AI can finish your sentences for you

Google has started rolling out “Help me write” — an experimental Gemini-powered generative AI feature for its Chrome browser that aims to help users write or refine text based on webpage content. Following the stable release of Chrome M122 on Tuesday, the new writing assistant is now available to try out on Mac and Windows PCs for English-speaking Chrome users in the US.

“Help me write” focuses on providing writing suggestions for shortform content, such as filling in digital surveys and reviews, enquiring about product information, or drafting descriptions for items being sold online. Google says the tool can “understand the context of the webpage you’re on” to pull relevant information into its suggestions — for example, highlighting key features mentioned on the product page for items you’re leaving a review on.

The “Help me write” feature has undergone some visual changes since it was first announced for Gmail during Google’s I/O event last May, now appearing as a floating application window beside the webpage text fields that are being filled with separate options to adjust length and tone. The Chrome release offers similar functionality to what Microsoft released for Edge and Bing search last year.

Users in the US will need to enable Chrome’s Experimental AI to use the feature, which can be found by clicking on Settings within the three-dot drop-down menu on Chrome desktop and then navigating to the Experimental AI page. From there, click on “Try out experimental AI features” and select “Help me write” and then “relaunch.” Users can then navigate to a webpage on Chrome and right-click on an open text field to use the writing assistant feature.

The Google support page includes a disclaimer that tells users not to provide personal information like their name, phone, address, social security number, or credit card information to the feature and that the tool shouldn’t be used on websites that contain personal or sensitive information. But if you do input such information, Google says that “Chrome will not use it for model training purposes.”

I’m not convinced the “Help me write” tool will prove very useful for most people — it’s not exactly a must-have feature driving the adoption of Edge and Copilot over the last year. The use cases provided by Google seem reasonable if the feature spits out the exact copy you need, but any time spent writing the prompts and adjusting the resulting text to suit your needs diminishes any time-saving benefits it may have provided. I can see some benefits for disabled users or people who aren’t completely fluent in English, but there’s also plenty to be concerned about — the ease with which this tool could be used to leave fake or disingenuous product reviews being one of them.