Google Puts AI in Your Phone So You Can … Copy and Paste?

David Burke says the next wave of Android smartphones will tackle one of the agonies of modern existence: Copying text from one app and pasting into another. Burke is the Google vice president of engineering who oversees Android. This week, at the annual Google I/O conference in Silicon Valley, he unveiled Android O, the latest incarnation of the world's most popular mobile operating system, and part of his pitch was that was that new OS could remove the extreme pain from cut and paste. Android O will automatically recognize and highlight names, places, and addresses in email messages and other text, he said, so you can copy and paste them without struggling to drag those horribly small and ridiculously uncooperative little arrow thingies from word to word. As seen on the big screen behind him, Burke double-tapped on the words "Old Coffee House" in an email, and Android highlighted all three of those words--no more and no less. That feat drew a very real round of applause from the hundreds of coders and other tech heads gathered at the Shoreline Amphitheater.