Wiggling the mouse is what people do involuntarily when the computer isn’t working right. They are setting themselves up for Gemini to be the uninvited Clippy, except this will send everything you are working on to Google to harvest data from.

Oh my goodness, the use cases are so… badly conceived:

> If a friend sends you a picture on your phone and you need to email it from your laptop, the file is just there — no need to email it to yourself.

So are there really people who will email a photo to themselves from their phone to… send the photo in an email?

Interesting to note that there is no mention of processor or operating system in that post. I’m guessing that it’s Android in a laptop form factor which I suppose might be something that some people would want, but I’m not one of them.

Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?

   ...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)...

edit: hah, maybe someone from Google saw my comment. This has now been fixed and TKTK replaced with https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1tb83gy/making_and...

> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.

This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.

Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.

Posting an official announcement of an AI-powered laptop on Reddit were the users there tend to have a hard Anti-AI stance is certainly something.

AI mouse pointer is definitely not something I wanted to think about today. A recent HN post implored vibe coders not to modify the mouse pointer and now we get this from Google.

"We’re working with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first Googlebooks."

A disaster from the first step.

Damn... ~1min in he verbally asks to put the 2 ingredients on the list.

Like... my dude that's way even slower than drag&drop the text on a light right next to it!

Same later on about changing the calendar appointment from whatever to 8pm... he is behind a desktop with a mouse, just input the number or click on the arrows to adjust.

I bet some people will mention that those are "just" simple to understand examples or that it's great for accessibility ... but it's not. It's not reliable enough for complex cases and not reliable enough for accessibility. So... yes JUST basic examples that are slower than other means.

PS: I did prototypes using voice and pointing in XR and yes that paradigm IS powerful, it's just being multimodal.

Well, that AI mouse pointer idea is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in quite awhile. Hard pass, do not want, do not trust anyone involved.

“Hey google, do something with this. Huh, I guess that’s fine.”

> It's really easy to access your phone’s files right from your Googlebook's file browser.

Yeah but what about Windows Explorer? They've been passively blocking SMB access forever at this point (by disallowing ports below 1024).

I would not be surprised if Googlebook's file browser goes via the cloud.