Google says it is using machine learning to improve Chrome browsing experience

Google has been leveraging machine learning (ML) to improve a lot of its products including the live translation feature in its AR glasses, image processing on its Tensor chips, and also its most popular browser, Chrome.

Just last month, Google unveiled the world’s largest publicly available machine learning hub.

“Recently we announced plans to invest $9.5 billion in data centres and offices across the US. One of our state-of-the-art data centres is in Mayes County, Oklahoma. I’m excited to announce that, there, we are launching the world’s largest, publicly-available machine learning hub for our Google Cloud customers,” Sundar Pichai said at Google I/O 2022.

The company is relying heavily on machine learning to be able to have its products do incredible features like the Pixel’s Real Tone camera, for example. The company is planning on making similar strides with its Chrome browser, which is used by more than 3 billion users worldwide.

Google’s Chrome browser uses cutting-edge machine learning techniques to enhance the browsing experience for its users. The company says machine learning allows Chrome to have features like “making web images more accessible for the visually impaired and real-time captions for videos to help those hard of hearing.”

Besides the browsing experience, Google says that the current machine learning feature also helps Chrome fight against phishing attacks. The company claims that the next iteration of the model will be able to identify “2.5 times more potentially malicious sites and phishing attacks as the previous model – resulting in a safer and more secure web.”

In a blog post, Google announced that it will launch a new on-device machine learning feature during Chrome’s next big update.

The company wrote, “To further improve the browsing experience, we’re also evolving how people interact with web notifications. On the one hand, page notifications help deliver updates from sites you care about; on the other hand, notification permission prompts can become a nuisance. To help people browse the web with minimal interruption, Chrome predicts when permission prompts are unlikely to be granted based on how the user previously interacted with similar permission prompts, and silences these undesired prompts. In the next release of Chrome, we’re launching an ML model that makes these predictions entirely on-device.”

Furthermore, Google will use machine learning to improve its Journeys feature, a tool designed “to help people retrace their steps online.” The update will make it easier for users to go back and find a website that they might have forgotten to bookmark.

“With ML and Journeys, Chrome brings together the pages you’ve visited about a given topic, and makes it easy to pick up where you left off (vs. scrolling through your browser history),” wrote Google.

“When you return to those hiking boots and camping guides, we’re also using ML to make those websites available in your preferred language. In particular, we’ve launched an updated language identification model to figure out the language of the page, and whether it needs to be translated to match your preferences. As a result, we’re seeing tens of millions more successful translations every day.”

Google is also planning to use machine learning to adjust the Chrome Toolbar in real-time according to what the user is doing at the moment. “We want to make sure Chrome is meeting you where you’re at, so in the near future, we’ll be using ML to adjust the toolbar in real-time – highlighting the action that’s most useful at that moment (e.g., share a link, voice search, etc.),” wrote the company.