Google's "copyless paste" feature could spare you a whole lot of taps

We may have a taste of a new feature Android O could offer us. Google is dubbing it “copyless paste” and it does exactly what the name implies.

As first reported by Venture Beat, copyless paste is an effort from Google to make the slightly tedious task of copying and pasting a thing of the past. The feature was spotted in the open source Chromium code depository and it appears to be under active development.

So, say you are in Chrome, looking for a restaurant to take your significant other out to and you think you have found the perfect place. But now you have to find out where this place is. So you put your index finger over the name, hold it there, wait for it to be highlighted, maybe even drag those teardrops around to get the whole name and then press copy. You probably haven’t thought about it, but doesn’t that sound like the worst experience ever? After all that, you don’t even feel like going out to dinner anymore.

Google’s plan to overcome this everyday nightmare is to use its machine learning to predict what you need to copy from an app or website, then store that string of text and make it available in other apps as a keyboard suggestion. Genius.

Even if the process will involve using machine learning to predict copy-paste targets, none of the data ever leaves the phone – it is all done locally.

If you want to check the existence of this feature out for yourself, head over to Chrome Canary for Android and switch it on in chrome://flags. But it probably won’t do anything until Google adds all the necessary ingredients to the mix.

We expect this to not only be a Chrome feature, but a whole OS feature that could make its grand reveal at Google I/O on May 17.