- Google’s new Simplify tool for iOS explains dense and confusing text on the web
- Simplify uses Gemini AI to translate the text into plain, readable language without leaving the page
- Users can highlight confusing content and tap the “Simplify” button to unravel the jargon
Reading an article on a technical or particularly complex subject sometimes feels like navigating a maze rather than following a narrative. Google‘s iOS app has a new solution if you come across a scientific paper or an article written by someone a little too fond of being obtuse. The new Simplify feature for Google’s mobile app rewrites any jargon-filled internet text into language that doesn’t require a specialty dictionary, and without leaving the app.
To use Simplify, you’ll need to browse the web from the Google app. When you hit a wall of needlessly complicated text, you can highlight it, and a little Simplify button will appear. Tapping the button will rework that highlighted paragraph into something far more comprehensible to the average person.
Simplify is essentially a shortcut for Google’s Gemini AI. Google Research designed a prompt-optimization process that asks Gemini to transform the text into something easier to understand behind the scenes, activating when you tap the Simplify button.
The Simplify button won’t utterly change your life or redefine how you engage with content online, but it could cut down on the need for new tabs or at least remove the need to copy and paste opaque text into Gemini or ChatGPT every time you run up against a linguistic roadblock.
Simple AI
According to the developers of the Simplify tool, the AI translation not only made dense content easier to parse, but it also helped them remember what they read. It’s of a piece with other AI tools rolled out by Google to streamline tedious or annoying bits of people’s experiences online.
It matches neatly with features like Google Gemini widgets or the anticipated Power Up button for improving your prompts. The Simplify feature also falls under the AI enhancement of the browsing experience that Google has deployed (with occasional pratfalls), like the Search Generative Experience and AI Overviews for Search. Simplify feels more directly pitched to individuals, though, since you have to choose to use it.
For now, Simplify is iOS-only, and it’s not going to be perfect every time. Like any AI tool, it might make a mistake or oversimplify its response and lose some of the nuance found in the original text. That’s a tradeoff common to any translation, however. It may also be a tradeoff most users will be happy to make, especially when the alternative is drowning in multisyllabic nonsense about blockchain governance protocols.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
