AI-powered app highlights, something many have been looking forward to, have now finally come to the Google Play Store. Google has been expanding its use of AI across all its devices and products. Gemini, the company’s controversial flagship AI model, has been making waves since its public release. The new Google Pixel phones also make use of nifty AI features and tools, which were one of the phones’ major selling points.
AI app highlights will streamline the user experience
What AI highlights will do is provide summaries of an application on the Play Store. Users have traditionally turned to reviews under an app to help them make a decision. The new Play Store version – v40.2 – comes with the AI app highlights feature. The release notes state “Watch the highlights of apps/games in places on the Google Play Store.”
This isn’t the first thing AI has been used for on the Google Play Store. The FAQ section for apps has been handled by AI for some time now. Like the highlights feature, the FAQ section would show users the most frequently asked questions and their answers. These answers were generated by AI. Similarly, AI will comb through an app’s description, and perhaps the reviews, and highlight the most important features users can expect.
This is becoming standard across the industry
Using AI to generate summaries and save time is becoming a standard practice across the industry. For example, Amazon implemented AI-generated review summaries last year. The AI reads through a product’s reviews and outputs a helpful little summary of how the product has been received. These summaries mention the aspects people have praised, as well as the not-so-great bits of said product.
Samsung also recently filed a patent for an AI document summarization tool. This tool will generate summaries for users and save them the trouble of having to read the entire document. What’s particularly interesting about this application is that these summaries will be customized for each user. Online tools have also popped up a dime a dozen for summarizing PDF files and other text documents.
Going forward, it’s quite possible this technology could expand to summarizing almost everything. Videos, podcasts, and entire books could start seeing AI-generated summaries. Google is almost assuredly going to continue playing with AI; seeing where it can fit and make something just a tiny bit better. AI app highlights on Google Play Store may seem revolutionary today, but it’s probably just the beginning of something much greater.
