Mobiles Tips and advice

This is how Smart Text Selection works in Android Oreo and Chrome

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How Smart Text Selection works? Android Oreo contains many small but useful features that you may not even have known existed. I’m going to take a closer look at all these new possibilities in a series of articles and Smart Text Selection is the first.

How Smart Text Selection works?

Smart Text Selection in Android Oreo can link appropriate apps to selected text. For example, it recognizes an address or phone number and then advises Maps or the phone app to open. Google has announced that the function in Android 8.1 Oreo will be expanded to more apps and Smart Text Selection has now also reached the stable version of Chrome . Have you installed Oreo and Chrome on your device? Then you can now, for example, select an address and open it in Maps.

The operation of Smart Text Selection takes place on the device, not in the cloud, so Google does not know which data you select. However, machine learning software TensorFlow Lite is used , which is also already incorporated in Android 8.1 Oreo in the form of Neural Networks API that can accelerate artificial intelligence on the device.

We are now waiting for support for this feature in more apps. I’ve tested it in multiple apps and can use it in Chrome, Trello and Gmail. Have you discovered other apps in which Smart Text Selection works? Let me know in the comments and I will adjust the article accordingly.