Ai Ai Ai. No not the Vanessa da Mata song—it’s the theme for tech in 2024. Last week, Microsoft announced new Surface laptops with artificial intelligence capabilities, and several PC manufacturers like Samsung, Asus, and Acer are launching new Windows machines to take advantage of the AI bump. Early in May, Google showed off its latest AI capabilities at the company’s developer conference. Many of these are coming to Android phones soon, and you can expect to hear the word “AI” thrown around for iOS and iPadOS at Apple’s own developer conference next month.
Naturally, all this activity means that Chromebooks are due for their AI upgrade. Google is bringing Gemini, its artificial intelligence chatbot, to Chromebook Plus laptops new and old.
Last year, Google introduced a new standard called Chromebook Plus, and it’s this moniker that denotes ChromeOS laptops that meet the specific hardware requirements to run the AI features. (Chromebook Plus machines typically cost more than $350.) The company is now offering new Chromebook Plus owners free 12 months of the Google One AI Premium plan, which includes Gemini Advanced. This top-tier large language model is more capable than the free version. A handful of Chromebook makers are coming out with new machines this spring and later in the year too, many of which will be equipped to hop on the AI bandwagon.
Here are a few of the top new features coming to ChromeOS.
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Google AI Comes to ChromeOS
Many of these features are exclusive to Chromebook Plus laptops, which have specific RAM and processor requirements to ensure a specific level of performance. I’m currently typing this story on the new HP Chromebook Plus x360, powered by an Intel Core i3 chipset, and with more than 20 tabs open, everything is running smoothly.
