What you need to know
- Chrome’s new Skills feature saves any AI prompt as a one-click tool.
- Save your best prompts directly from your chat history and trigger them via a forward slash (/) or the plus (+) button.
- Skills can run on your current page while simultaneously pulling data from other open tabs to aggregate information.
If you’ve ever had to type out “make this recipe vegan” or “summarize this PDF” over and over in a single day, Google has a fix. Chrome is rolling out a new feature called Skills that turns those repetitive AI tasks into something you can do with just one click.
Until now, using Gemini in Chrome often meant starting from scratch each time. You might get a prompt working well on one site, but then have to set it up again on the next. With Skills, that hassle is mostly gone.
Now, you can save a prompt from your chat history as a permanent tool. When you need it again, just press the forward slash (/) or plus sign (+) in the Gemini sidebar. The AI will use that prompt on the page you’re viewing, and you can even have it pull data from other open tabs.
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Early testers have already come up with some specific workflows. Instead of just using AI in a basic way, they’re creating personalized toolkits for specific tasks, like calculating protein macros for any recipe on your screen or comparing specs across several open tabs without switching back and forth.
If you’re not sure how to begin, Google is also offering a Skills library. It comes with ready-made prompts for things like breaking down product ingredients or finding the perfect gift by matching your budget with a friend’s interests. Also, you’re not limited to the default settings. If a Skill from the library is close but not quite right, you can edit the prompt to fit your style.
(Image credit: Google)
Whenever an AI tool starts reading your tabs, privacy is a big concern. Google says Skills use the same security as the rest of Chrome. The system will always ask for your approval before doing anything important, like adding an event to your calendar or sending an email. It also uses automated checks and updates to keep things running smoothly.
For now, this update is only available to some users. You need to be on Chrome desktop with your language set to English-US to get it. If you’re signed in, your saved Skills will show up on all your desktop devices. To manage them, type the forward slash (/) and click the compass icon to open your dashboard.
Android Central’s Take
Skills looks like the productivity boost I’ve been waiting for. Skipping the “Dear Gemini, please pretend you’re a nutritionist…” intro and jumping right to my macro count is a real time-saver. Still, Google is basically giving us a macro recorder because we can’t remember three sentences. These one-click workflows make us feel like power users, but it also feels like we’re getting closer to letting the browser do all the thinking for us.
