Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- PixelShot is a brand new app that copies Google’s Pixel Screenshots app.
- Like Pixel Screenshots, PixelShot collects and analyzes your screenshots so you may search by them later.
- Not like Pixel Screenshots, the app is on the market for all Android gadgets and never simply the Pixel 9. Nonetheless, it doesn’t work absolutely offline.
It’s arduous to place collectively a listing of one of the best Android apps as a result of there are simply so many to select from and everybody’s tastes are completely different. Among the greatest apps do one thing distinctive that no different app replicates, whereas others are merely one of the best of their class. I’m significantly keen on apps that replicate performance distinctive to explicit gadgets, as these give me the liberty to make use of no matter Android telephone I need. That’s why once I discovered of a brand new app referred to as PixelShot, which principally copies Google’s Pixel Screenshots app, I used to be excited to strive it out.
Pixel Screenshots, when you aren’t acquainted, is an app that’s unique to the Google Pixel 9 collection. It makes use of on-device AI to investigate the screenshots that you just take, extract textual content and different pertinent information from these screenshots, after which make a database that you would be able to later search by utilizing the app. For example, think about you’re taking a screenshot of a textual content message or e-mail despatched by your Airbnb host that accommodates a sensible lock code. Once you arrive at your Airbnb, you may open the Pixel Screenshots app and search “code” to shortly discover that screenshot with the knowledge you want.
The brand new PixelShot app by developer Mehul Kanzariya takes this concept and makes it out there to any Android telephone, however with just a few caveats that I’ll get to in a bit. Like Pixel Screenshots, the PixelShot app processes your screenshots to extract textual content from them. It then makes use of an AI mannequin to generate summaries of that textual content which you’ll be able to later search by utilizing the app’s built-in search characteristic. You possibly can even manually add notes to particular person screenshots and arrange them into collections, similar to in Pixel Screenshots. The most effective half is that PixelShot is free, doesn’t have any advertisements, and works on any system working Android 11 and later.
So what’s the catch? Nicely, for starters, PixelShot isn’t as personal as Pixel Screenshots is. The developer says that your screenshots themselves are by no means uploaded to the cloud, which is nice, nevertheless he says that the textual content out of your screenshots is uploaded to the cloud so an AI mannequin can summarize it. Particularly, the developer says the app extracts textual content out of your screenshots regionally utilizing the on-device textual content extraction machine studying mannequin offered by Google’s ML Equipment SDK. It then uploads that textual content to a Llama 3 8B Instruct hosted on Replicate to summarize the uncooked textual content and generate a related title. The extracted textual content isn’t saved on the cloud, based on the developer. In the meantime, the AI-generated title and abstract are saved regionally on the system utilizing a Room Database.
As a result of there’s a cloud element to this app, the developer can’t assure the app can be free eternally. The truth is, he says that when utilization of his app will increase, he’s planning on including in-app purchases and advertisements to pay for the API price.
These are comprehensible limitations given the constraints the app is working below. Hopefully as soon as the Gemini Nano API is opened up extra broadly, PixelShot can make the most of Nano to summarize textual content solely on-device. The preliminary model of Gemini Nano out there on most gadgets doesn’t help pictures, although, so the app will nonetheless must depend on ML Equipment to extract textual content.
Talking of which, the truth that PixelShot can solely deal with textual content in screenshots is one other distinction between it and Pixel Screenshots. In the event you take a screenshot of one thing that doesn’t have any textual content in it, say a purple shoe, then PixelShot gained’t have the ability to generate a related abstract for it. Moreover, the app doesn’t course of screenshots within the background, so that you’ll must open it up now and again to have it analyze them.
In any case, give PixelShot a strive when you’re in search of one thing like Google’s Pixel Screenshots, however you don’t have a Pixel 9. Even when it isn’t excellent, it will get the job completed and works precisely as described. If you end up taking quite a lot of screenshots so you may bear in mind issues in a while, then it may prevent some bother down the street.
