In theory, anyway, but I’ll get to that. According to an article, Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI.

The article from The Verge titled (wait for it!) Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI (written by Jay Peters and available here), Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you’re reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you’ve actually clicked a link.

However, you probably won’t see this feature, which Google is calling “SGE while browsing,” right away.

Google says it’s a new feature that’s starting to roll out Tuesday as “an early experiment” in its opt-in Search Labs program. (You’ll get access to it if you already opted in to SGE, but if you haven’t, you can opt in to the feature on its own.) It will be available first in the Google app on Android and iOS, and the company is bringing it to the Chrome browser on desktop “in the days ahead.”

If you do have access in the Google app on mobile, Google will pull up a set of AI-generated “key points” from an article after you tap an icon at the bottom of the screen. The feature is designed to work “only on articles that are freely available to the public on the web”; Google says it won’t work with websites that publishers mark as paywalled.

Google is making a handful of other improvements to SGE, too. On the SGE results for a search query about topics like science, economics, and history, Google says you’ll be able to hover over certain words to get definitions or diagrams about a topic. Google is also making it easier to understand SGE’s summaries of coding information.

Call me impatient, but since it’s “available” on Android and iOS, I went ahead and turned it on for my Google app there. While they provide examples of web pages where the summarization feature will work, I couldn’t find one on my own where it would work.

I first started with this morning’s blog post on eDiscovery Today, but Google said it wasn’t indexed yet and it couldn’t provide any info. Then, I picked a case law post from a month ago. For that page, I don’t get a summary, but I did get a list of web pages with “related insights” – some from eDiscovery Today, some from other sites (including a 7-year old post of mine on CloudNine’s site 🙂 ). Useful, but not the summarization I was looking for.

I also tried posts on Rob Robinson’s ComplexDiscovery site and Ralph Losey’s e-Discovery Team^® site – again, no summarization, but related insights. Finally, I tried some general news articles from NBC, CNN, etc. – still, no dice. Maybe I did something wrong, but I don’t think so.

So, they’re right when they say that you won’t see the feature right away, even on Android and iOS (where you can turn on the feature). Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI, but it doesn’t appear to do so just yet – not on the articles I tried, anyway. I’ll keep trying and may publish an update if/when I start to see some results.

Of course, some eDiscovery platforms are starting to do that with documents in eDiscovery collections (at least in Beta), which promises to help streamline review – especially on long documents with a lot of content.

So, what do you think? Are you excited about AI-generated summarization of articles? Or are you wary of it? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.