Ryan Haines / Android Authority
In summary
- The new Pixel Screenshots app only automatically processes about 15 screenshots per day.
- Pixel Screenshots is a new app on the Google Pixel 9 that extracts information from your screenshots, allowing you to search through them later.
- Many compare it to Microsoft's Recall feature for Windows, but Recall processes many more screenshots and much more frequently.
The Google Pixel 9 The Pixel 9 series made its debut at the Made by Google event earlier this week , and as everyone expected, Google AI was the centerpiece of the event, even more so than the actual hardware. The Pixel 9 not only introduces exciting new AI camera features like Add Me and Reimagine, but also new AI-powered apps like Pixel Screenshots.
Pixel screenshots is a new app that uses on-device AI to analyze the screenshots you take, extract text and other information from those screenshots, and then create a database that you can later search. For example, if you took a screenshot of a flan recipe a few months ago, you can open the Pixel Screenshots app and search for “flan recipe” to quickly find that screenshot. You can even type questions about the recipe into the search bar, and the Pixel Screenshots app will use on-device AI to generate an answer.
The on-device AI model used by Pixel Screenshots is called Gemini Nano with multimodality, the latest version of Google's Gemini Nano large language model (LLM) that can handle text, audio, speech, and image processing. Gemini Nano with multimodality is currently only available on the latest Pixel phones with the Google Tensor G4 processor, including the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL and Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
Because Pixel Screenshots uses on-device AI to process your screenshots in the background, Google has placed some limitations on it in the interest of saving battery life. A product manager on the sidelines of the Made by Google event told me that the Pixel 9 throttles the Pixel Screenshots app, so it only automatically processes about 15 screenshots a day. The rest are processed when the device is idle and charging, though I've heard there's some way to override this, presumably by opening the Pixel Screenshots app.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Limiting the Pixel Screenshots app so that it only automatically processes about 15 screenshots per day is a smart decision, given how resource-intensive the processing likely is. Google tells us that it takes about 15-20 seconds to process a screenshot in the background, so if the Pixel Screenshots app were to take a screenshot every 5 seconds, for example, like Windows Recall does, then it can take 3-4 hours to process an hour of screenshots in the background. Of course, this could probably be done a lot faster by dedicating more resources to Pixel Screenshots, but Google has intentionally limited it to 15 screenshots to save battery and also maintain system health, as they don’t want the processing of screenshots to interrupt critical flows like taking a photo.
I’m sure modders will find a way around these restrictions, but would anyone really want that? While Android’s app data model is inherently more secure than Windows’, the privacy implications of storing everything you do in a big, searchable database is a bit daunting to many. I personally think Google made the right choice by limiting Pixel Screenshots to screenshots you take manually.