Late last year in November, we spotted a couple of commits in the Chromium Gerrit regarding a new feature called "Quick Answers." The code indicated that the upcoming feature would work much like Android's contextual shortcuts, allowing users to highlight text and get relevant suggestions using Google's Knowledge Graph Search API. Now, the feature has finally made its way to the Chrome OS Canary channel, giving us a clearer look at its functionality.

As per a recent report from Chrome Unboxed, the #enable-quick-answers flag, which adds this new feature to Chrome OS, has now been enabled in the Canary channel. Once you enable the flag, highlighting any text on a website on Chrome OS adds a new option to the context menu which displays relevant information based on the highlighted text. The feature works a lot like the "Look Up" function on macOS and offers suggestions like definitions, conversions, and translations for the highlighted words.

Chrome OS

In case the feature isn't able to find any suggestion, the feature gives you the option to retrieve results directly from the Google Assistant, much like you would on your Android device. As long as the Assistant is enabled on your Chromebook, clicking the "See results in Assistant" button will bring up the Assistant from the bottom of the screen and show the top results, related queries, search options and more.

It's worth noting that the feature is only available in Chrome OS Canary version 81 and it's disabled by default. This suggests that it wouldn't be released in the stable version for another few months and Google might make some significant changes before it's released.

Source: Chrome Unboxed