Google Chrome: AI Skills to Automate Your Tasks

Google Enhances Chrome with AI: Skills to Automate Your Tasks

Google has recently unveiled a significant advancement for its web browser Chrome by integrating new features based on artificial intelligence. These additions, grouped under the name Skills, aim to provide users with the ability to save and reuse their favorite AI prompts. This innovation allows users to apply these instructions across different web pages without having to re-enter them each time.

The introduction of Skills is part of the integration of Google’s Gemini AI into Chrome. This integration coincides with the emergence of new players in the browser space, such as OpenAI with Atlas, Perplexity with Comet, and The Browser Company with Dia. Gemini, already present in Chrome, enables users to ask questions about the content of a web page, summarize information, or perform various tasks. Skills take this a step further by allowing users to create reusable AI prompts with a single click.

Let’s consider a concrete example provided by Google: a user who frequently visits recipe sites and often asks Gemini to suggest vegan alternatives can now save this prompt. They will be able to easily apply it across different web pages thanks to the Skills feature.

To take advantage of this new functionality, users simply need to save an AI prompt as a Skill directly from the chat history. This Skill can then be reused in Gemini on Chrome by typing a forward slash ( / ) or clicking the plus button ( + ). The Skill will execute not only on the current web page being viewed but also on any other tab selected by the user.

Google specifies that these Skills can be modified at any time, offering flexibility in usage. During preliminary testing, the company observed that early users employed Skills in various areas such as health and wellness, for example, to calculate protein macros in recipes or to perform shopping comparisons and summarize lengthy documents.

To facilitate the adoption of Skills, Google also offers a dedicated library. This library provides a selection of pre-programmed Skills covering common tasks in areas such as productivity, shopping, recipes, budgeting, and more. Users can add these Skills to their collection in Chrome and customize them by modifying the prompt to better meet their specific needs.

As with other Gemini actions in Chrome, using Skills will require user confirmation before executing certain actions, such as sending an email or adding an event to a calendar.

The rollout of Skills begins today for Chrome users on desktop who are logged into their Google account. However, this feature will initially be available only if the Chrome browser language is set to English (US).