Google is bringing AI summaries to ‘Files’ so you can find your docs quicker

Google is full speed ahead on AI-powered features for Android devices, and a new summarization tool for Files might be added to the list.

Sleuths at Android Authority and 9to5Google looked into the code of an upcoming beta release and discovered a feature that will provide AI summaries for documents saved in Google’s Files app. At this point, it’s possible the feature will be scrapped or saved for a later release, but the two outlets have found that AI summaries in Files are in active development.

Google has employed generative AI’s powerful ability to crawl and summarize massive amounts of text with AI summaries in Search. Dubbed AI overviews, this feature was plagued early on with inaccuracies and hallucinations, some of which was due to the quality of information it scraped from the web. But running the summarization task on presumably reliable files created by the user has potential for much more success.

A glimpse into the code shows that Google’s AI model will search amongst text files and provide brief descriptions of what each file is about. So this way, users can scan the summary of a document instead of opening it when they’re looking for a particular document.

It’s believed that this featured will be supported by Gemini Nano, the smallest and most lightweight version of Gemini. This means the feature will be processed on-device, instead of in the cloud. Evidence in the code also suggests that this feature can be toggled on or off in Settings.

If you’re feeling AI fatigue… don’t expect any relief soon. The newly-released Google Pixel 9 has “officially too much AI,” said Mashable’s Alex Perry in his review. “Google is going so hard on these features, championing them as the big selling points of the Pixel 9 family, and none of them are really transformative nor innovative in ways that matter.”

That said, Perry found some of the features to be genuinely useful, like the ability to search for screenshots. It sounds like AI summaries for Files might fall into the modest, but genuinely useful category. But we’ll have to wait and see.