These Chromebook features make reading and writing easier with AI
Did you know that your Chromebook has built-in reading and writing assistance? Help Me Read and Help Me Write are two AI-powered features built into Google’s Chromebook Plus line.
Designed to help summarize articles and blog posts, Help Me Read is a great tool that I think everyone can benefit from. Help Me Write is just as useful, as it makes a great companion to help you jumpstart ideas when you’re stuck writing.
- Operating system
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ChromeOS
- Processor
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Intel i3-N305
The HP Chromebook x360 14b offers an 8-core Intel i3-N305 processor, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, and 128GB of UFS storage to deliver solid laptop performance. Flanked by a 14-inch 1080p touchscreen and a 360-degree hinge, this Chromebook is ready to take on whatever you throw at it.
What are Help Me Read and Help Me Write?
If you haven’t heard of Help Me Read or Help Me Write on your Chromebook, it’s basically a built-in AI feature that can either help you summarize text or write for you. Both features require at least a Chromebook Plus to work, so if you’re using an older Chromebook or a base model, this unfortunately won’t be available to you.
Help Me Read is designed to give you a summary of a web page and even answer questions about the content. I’ve tried it on several blog posts here on How to Geek, and I was pleasantly surprised by the result. Thanks to it, I was able to get a quick overview of the articles in question. I asked follow-up questions and the AI assistant answered my questions correctly using the context of the article.
Help me write works in the same way, but from a writing point of view. I’ve used it several times to get him to write blog posts on various topics. Although I wouldn’t publish the generated articles, it worked fine and produced a pretty solid result.
I see more uses for the Help Me Read feature than the Help Me Write feature, but both work quite well. I would, however, like to offer a word of caution. The two blog posts generated by Help me write were okay, but they certainly weren’t perfect. If I wanted to use content from either, I would have had to do a good edit. This isn’t necessarily a flaw in Help me write, but just a warning about AI in general. Asking the AI to write for you sounds great, but you’ll definitely want to reread the result, as there are often glaring flaws that a computer might not detect, but humans certainly will.
How to use Help Me Read
Using Help me read is actually quite simple. It works on just about any website or text on your Chromebook and is accessible by simply right-clicking on the content. Once you right-click on what you want Help Me to read about, a pop-up window will appear where you can either ask a question or simply click the “Summary” button to get the summary. Be careful though, once a summary is generated, that’s it. I haven’t found a way to generate a summary again.
An article I tried to summarize with Help Me Read had a pop-up displayed, and that’s what Help Me Read summarized. Once I closed the popup, I couldn’t get it to summarize the page again. I left the page, did a full refresh, and tried several other things, but the popup summary was the only thing Help Me Read was showing for that page.
The summaries generated by Help me read were quite accurate. I had him summarize articles I had written in the past, and everything went well. However, the articles were quite simple and well written (if I do say so myself). For more complicated or complex topics, it might be a good idea to use the summary tool to get a general idea of what the article says, but then check the facts yourself without the AI.
How to use Help Me Write
Help me write works in a very similar way. Simply right-click in any text box and the Help me write prompt will be available. Once you get to the prompt, simply give him the criteria for what you want him to write. Be as descriptive as possible here, because the AI is only as effective as the prompt you give it. If you only say a few words, it will still be written, but it may not be as precise as if you gave it several sentences with a few bullet points.
As I mentioned earlier, even with good incentives, Google’s AI result with Help me write was only okay. There were several things I would change if I used it to write for me. Some of the changes I would make were to the grammar and flow of things, and other parts were just plain wrong. Where I see the writing help feature of Chromebooks being useful is with idea generation. If you’re stuck on a topic and can’t come up with ideas, simply use Help Me Write to get your ideas flowing. The result of Help Me Write is good enough to get ideation started, and that’s where I think it will shine.
Once you’ve mastered Help Me Read and Help Me Write, there are plenty of other tips and tricks for power Chromebook users to check out. From more complex tasks like enabling Linux to using virtual desktops to gain more screen real estate, Chromebooks are packed with features aimed at power users once you learn how to use them.
