Whenever you would highlight some text on your smartphone, wouldn’t it be easier if it could somehow read your mind and predict what you will do with that text? Smart Text Selection was part of the new features of Android 8.0 Oreo when it was first introduced and it does that, giving you a shortcut to the app you will most likely use for that highlighted text. It’s been on beta and dev versions of Google Chrome for some time now, but now finally it’s on the stable version of the browser, provided your device is running Oreo already.
How it works is fairly simple (well, at least on the user end). When you highlight text from your browser, it will recognize what the text is and then try to give you an app shortcut to the one you’ll probably use it for. It’s located at the same bar that will appear with the select all, copy, paste, etc options. So for example, you highlight or tap on a phone number, it will give you the phone app or if you choose anaddreoss, it will suggest opening it on Google Maps.
However Smart Text Selection doesn’t work on text messages, just on the Chrome browser and Gmail so far. This feature is also enabled on an app-by-app basis. But the good news is that they are now opening it up to developers so that they will be able to add the functionality to their app. This feature will not send your data to the cloud and is instead using Google’s Machine Learning algorithms to work this “magic”.
Smart Text Selection will already work on all builds of Google Chrome (beta, dev, Canary, and stable) on your Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL running on Android 8.1 Oreo.
VIA: XDA Developers
