Smart Text Selection on Chromebooks will support multiple actions

We’ve already known that smart text selection is coming to Chromebooks, but now we know it will support multiple actions. Smart text selection is a feature introduced in Android Oreo which lets you highlight certain text and get a suggested action in return. For example, if you highlight text containing a phone number, the feature will recommend that the default dialer application be opened to call that number. On Android, only one smart recommendation is made based on the selected text. However, according to a commit on the Chromium Gerrit, it looks like Chromebooks are going to be smarter than our Android devices… at least when it comes to Smart Text Selection, anyway.

The commit specifically mentions “multiple smart text selections” which will be available by right-clicking. As for when we’ll start to see the functionality roll out, we can’t quite say. The flag does exist in Google Chrome Canary and it can be enabled, but it doesn’t seem to work just yet. That could change any day as more code commits are made to get the feature up and running. It’s a pretty simple but helpful addition. For example, if somebody sends you an address, you can highlight and right click that address. You’ll get Google Maps recommended to you so that you can just jump straight to the address you highlighted. It can really save you time.

If you’re wondering how to enable the feature, it’s pretty easy but you need to make sure you’re on the Canary version. Simply navigate to the following URL.

chrome://flags/#smart-text-selection

Enabling the option there is enough to switch the feature on, but it doesn’t quite do anything yet.

Google appears to not only be porting features to Chrome OS that they already brought to Android, but they seem to be improving upon them as well. I’m also curious whether this addition of multiple recommendations could be a sign that our Android phones may receive multiple smart text selection options as well. How well it’ll work, though, we’ll have to wait and see.

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