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What's Google Chrome's Screen AI?

6 points by itvision ↗ HN
I don't want any fancy AI features from my web browser yet I've recently discovered a huge library/extension in my Google Chrome's profile directory:

    $ du -hs screen_ai
    255M screen_ai
which contains libchromescreenai.so weighing 263,110,752 bytes.

What is it? Is it possible to disable it for good? I can imagine Google will now regularly push its updates which I do not want either.

4 comments

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itvision
From https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40810109 and https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/33...

    Add Screen AI service for accessibility annotations.

    To improve the accessibility tree based on visual data, a snapshot of
    the screen is sent to a local machine learning library. The library will
    provide annotations for the snapshot and the annotations will be used
    to update the accessibility tree.
    This CL adds a Screen AI sand-boxed service to load the library, and
    general infrastructure to pass the images from renderer to the library
    and getting back and applying the annotations.
    The actual details on how the annotations are processed and used will be
    added in subsequent CLs.

    See more in go/chrome-screen-ai.

    This change is behind kScreenAI flag and disabled by default.
I still have no clue. Annotations for screenshots?
nolist_policy
Sounds like a11y without the apps having to explicitly implement it.

"accessibility tree" is generally the interface trough which apps provide a11y information to the OS.

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