The Google Pixel 10 series may have been the highlight of today’s Made by Google event , but as with all things Google in recent times, AI-related progress is also worth highlighting. This time, Google Photos is getting a fun new feature : You’ll be able to use your voice to edit photos in the app. The feature is coming first to the Pixel 10 in the U.S., the company announced at the event.
Google claims this feature works in real time and you’ll be able to immediately see the changes appear after you ask Google Photos to make edits. This sounds like it’ll make it easier to edit photos for people who aren’t skilled at doing it themselves—you can simply ask the app to create the desired effect and it’ll handle the rest, Google says.
The examples Google shares include queries like “restore this old photo” or “remove the cars in the background,” both of which, if they work as expected, are a lot easier to do via AI. For people who don’t know what kind of edits they want, Google says simpler voice commands like “make it better” will also work. It also supports contextual follow-ups for you to make further tweaks to the image using voice commands.
During the Pixel 10 launch event, Google did show a live demo of how voice-prompted editing works. The host of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Alex Cooper, took a photo with Jimmy Fallon (of The Tonight Show fame), and asked Google Photos to fix the lighting and the frame. The photo featured Cooper and Fallon, but a bright spotlight had messed up its lighting and the frame was also asymmetrical. In the demo, Gemini was able to turn their picture into a well-lit photo and it cropped rotated the picture slightly to fix the frame as well.
However, that does raise important ethical questions around the nature of photographs if Gemini generates things that weren’t in the original image or gets the colors wrong in an edit. Google has addressed this to some extent by adding support for C2PA Content Credentials in Google Photos, which lets you view how the image was created and edited, and if AI was used in the process, as shown here:
Credit: Google
Pixel 10 is implementing this C2PA Content Credentials standard in its native camera app. This feature will slowly roll out to other Android devices and Google Photos for iOS in the coming weeks.
