Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR Circle to Search has been a great tool for working with on-screen content, and Google’s been developing similar solutions across its ecosystem.
Earlier this year we first uncovered evidence of a Circle to Search-like feature for Gemini.
While still not user-accessible, Google’s been changing how this tool is labeled and what happens once you activate it.
Google’s long had a bit of overlap when it comes to all the various services and apps it offers, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that it can be a little tricky keeping track of what functionality is available where. For instance, just last week we saw Google bringing AI Mode search to Circle to Search. And we’ve already been able to share what’s on our screen with Gemini Live. But what about using screen input with regular old Gemini? That’s not yet publicly available, but a couple months back we took an early look at how it was coming together — and now we’ve got some progress to share.
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Last time around, we previewed an in-development Gemini change that would add an “Ask about screen” button to the Gemini overlay. Hitting that would select your entire screen for Gemini input, or you could circle a specific area to narrow that down.
Looking at the recent 16.27.68.sa.arm64 beta build of the Google app for Android, we’ve identified some changes to that workflow. For one, we could be getting a whole new button altogether. We spotted this text string within the app:
Code Copy Text
And sure enough, when trying to activate screen input for Gemini, we find this new “Tell me about this” option.
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