Bringing AI to smartphones and tablets has been a massive success for Google, which earlier this month saw its AI assistant Gemini become the top free app on Apple App Store for the first time. More specifically, AI and Gemini have come to be an integral part of the past few major Android updates, and at this point are super-well integrated into the Android ecosystem.
For now, the same can’t be said of ChromeOS, Google’s lightweight operating system for computers and laptops. But that’s all set to change.
Earlier this year, Google CEO Sameer Samat confirmed that ChromeOS and Android would be combining in order to create a more seamless experience across devices. Speaking at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii on Wednesday Samat said it’s one of things he’s “super excited about for next year” and gave a bunch of additional details about the how and why behind the move.
“For a long time, mobile phones and PCs have been communicating… now we have this opportunity with large-screen compute to add that in,” he said. “In the Android ecosystem, you have all these different devices, and you want your AI to be able to work across all of them. So that’s the new era.”
That doesn’t mean ChromeOS is going away though. “If you think about the laptop form factor, we’ve had ChromeOS for a long time, and we’re super committed to that platform, and it’s been really successful for us,” said Samat. In fact, the ChromeOS experience will remain, but its the baseline technology will switch to running on Android, he added.
Speaking on Tuesday at the Snapdragon Summit, Google’s SVP of Devices and Services Rick Osterloh shed some more light on the technicalities of the project. “We’re building together a technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems,” he said. “This is another way that we can leverage all of the great work we’re doing together on our AI stack, our full stack, bringing Gemini models, bringing the assistant, bringing all of our application and developer community into the PC domain.”
It will be fascinating to see what new experiences Gemini will enable on ChromeOS, and how it might elevate Google’s big-screen OS for this new era. Google will be hoping it can replicate the success of its AI-based mobile operating system across its laptops and make its Chromebooks even more appealing to Android phone owners looking to upgrade their computers thanks to the seamless integration of Gemini across their different devices.
