Remember that awesome Now on Tap feature that Google showed off at I/O last week? It’s only going to be available in Android M, and it’s not even included in the current developer preview, so it might be a while before any of us get to actually use it. However, Google today announced a new feature for Chrome that gets us pretty close.
Chrome for Android will let you search for any web page by tapping on a word, and because Chrome will know what page you’re on, it’ll know the context of the word that you highlighted and have a better idea of what results to present to you. In Google’s demo, it shows a a news article that mentions the movie Captain America: Civil War. The user highlights the word “America” and is presented with a search for Captain America: Civil War, complete with images, cast and release info, and more.
This new Chrome feature isn’t quite as powerful as Now on Tap since it can’t schedule appointments in your calendar and perform other, similar functions. It still looks pretty handy, though, and the best part is that it doesn’t require a whole new version of Android. You’ll just need to be running the stable version of Chrome on your Android device and you can give it a go. Google says that the feature will roll out “over the next few days” — with Asian language support to follow — so be sure to keep an eye out.
