Google announces a new Chromebook Plus and AI features coming soon

Google has announced a new series of AI-powered features coming to their Chromebook Plus series, as well as a new Chromebook Plus model from Lenovo. 

The new Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 will be powered by the new MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 ARM processor, with up to 16GB of memory, 256GB of storage and includes a 14″ 1920 x 1200 resolution display – all powered by a battery capable of up to 17 hours of use.

Google says the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14  will include two new exclusive features powered by on-device machine learning – Smart Grouping, which will organise your tabs and documents into logical groupings based on your current tasks, and AI Image editing in the Gallery app – letting you do things like remove backgrounds or create stickers from your images. 

The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 will also see custom wallpapers of Jupiter which have been created in partnership with NASA which will show auroras at various times of the day. 

For existing Chromebook Plus owners, there’s a host of new features coming to ChromeOS including Select To Search for Google Lens, so you can select part of your screen for Google to search – basically Circle To Search for ChromeOS.

Google will also now let you pull text from images, including receipts and recipes, automatically extracting text and allowing you to edit it or copy it somewhere new. 

Generative AI images will also be easier to access, with a new ‘Quick Insert’ key.

Summaries will get even more useful, with Google saying that their new ‘Simplify’ button will now make complex language more understandable.

There’s also going to be more apps and games available for Chromebooks, with games like Squid Game: Unleashed and apps like AI-photo editing app Luminar being optimised for larger displays. 

For those purchasing a Chromebook Plus this year, you’ll receive 12 months access to the Google AI Pro plan, which includes 2TB of cloud storage, as well as access to Gemini in Gmail, Docs. 

There’s no release date announced for Australia as yet, however it does appear to be on their Chromebook Plus site listed ‘from $1,199’. When it does go on-sale, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 will be sold at JB Hi-Fi & Officeworks and we’ll update as soon as we have an official date.