Adding Generative Summaries with Chrome AI (www.raymondcamden.com)

Chrome’s Summarizer API is now fully released for Chrome (no flag required), and a recent demo shows how easy it is to add in-browser generative summaries to a product-review page. The developer flow is simple: feature-detect window.Summarizer, call Summarizer.availability(), create a Summarizer instance (you can pass options for type and length), and then call summarizer.summarize(text). Because the API requires user interaction, the demo reveals a “Summarize Reviews” button and ties summarization to a click. The demo also listens to downloadprogress events (the model may need to be fetched), parses the returned Markdown, and explicitly labels the output as AI-generated. The sample reviews were generated with Gemini and the summarizer produces concise, human-readable summaries that capture praise (sturdiness, locking mechanism, ventilation) and complaints (assembly, quality control, sharp edges). This matters for the AI/ML community because it demonstrates a practical, privacy- and latency-friendly pattern for client-side generative features: progressive enhancement that only activates in capable browsers, explicit user consent via interaction, and developer control over style/length. Technically, developers should account for availability checks and possible model downloads, and can integrate summarization at scale (hundreds of reviews) while keeping UX choices — e.g., toggling visibility and labeling outputs — front and center.