Gemini in Chrome gets new ‘Select from Screen’ tool on desktop

Google is clearly in love with the idea of ​​using screen content to initiate searches, and over the years we’ve seen variation after variation on this same theme, from Google Lens to Circle to search. Google has never been a company to shy away from a bit of redundancy, and this week it’s sharing its latest tool to perform this same kind of trick.

Earlier this week, Google updated its Gemini on Chrome Support Pages to introduce a new “Select from Screen” tool for Chrome on the desktop. Accessing it is quite simple: users must first click “Ask Gemini” and then press the plus sign for Gemini’s Add menu. Here, you can finally choose “Select from Screen” to start drawing a box around the content you want Gemini to see. That includes multiple screen areas at once. When you have them all highlighted, you can go ahead and present Gemini with your message.

That’s all there is to it to use it, and as you can probably see, this already looks a lot like Chrome’s integration with Google Lens, only here it leans more towards Gemini, while Lens takes you to a normal Google search page (to be fair, one you can always interact with). Fashion AI.

You obviously need to have Gemini enabled in Chrome to take advantage of this input feature, and that requires signing in to the browser with a Google account; will not work on Incognito. If that worries you, Chrome’s Lens support still works without an account, even in incognito mode.

Chrome users should start seeing “Select from Screen” available in their browsers starting now. If you don’t get it (and you’re sure you have Gemini enabled in Chrome in the first place), make sure you’ve updated to the latest version of Chrome 149.