Google Announces Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 and Touts New AI Features for Other Models

Google announced today a couple of new AI features that will be coming to all Chromebook Plus models, including a brand new Chromebook Plus 14 from Lenovo. The company claims that this is the most powerful ARM-based Chromebook featuring a 50 TOPS NPU capable of handling exclusive AI features.

Chromebook Plus devices are a new category of Chromebooks with powerful specs and enhanced productivity features. The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, which starts at $649.99, comes with a MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 ARM chip, up to 16GB of memory, up to 156GB of storage, and a 14″ 1920 x 1200 OLED display.

Lenovo’s Chromebook Plus 14 is also the first Chromebook Plus device to offer Dolby Atmos support, and the company promises up to 17 hours of battery life while browsing the web. At $749.99, the premium model also comes with a touch-enabled display and a fingerprint reader.

The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 will offer two exclusive features: AI image editing in the Gallery app and smart grouping. The latter will automatically group open tabs and documents together based on users’ current tasks.

Just as Microsoft has been banging the AI drum with Copilot+ PCs, Google is starting to do the same with Chromebook Plus devices. Today, the company detailed a couple of new AI features that will be coming to the full portfolio:

Select to search with Lens: This feature, which looks similar to Circle to Search on Android, will let users drag the mouse cursor to select an area on the screen and get instant answers about it. This feature can be enabled by doing a long press on the launcher icon, and it’s also available within the screenshot tool.

Text Capture: This feature intelligently extracts text from images, and it’s also smart enough to suggest creating calendar events when highlighting a date or adding items to a shopping list from a recipe.

Quick Insert key: Users can use this new key to quickly insert photos and emojis in documents or presentations or generate AI images on demand.

Help me read: This experimental feature, which will appear alongside the ‘Summarize’ option when highlighting text, will turn complex text into something easier to digest.

Lastly, Google highlighted today new apps and games optimized for Chromebooks, including the AI photo editing app Luminar and Netflix’s Squid Game: Unleashed game. To make Chromebook Plus devices more attractive, the company is also now offering 12 free months of Google AI Pro ($240 value) with the purchase of any model.