With many of us so busy, it’s difficult to stay on top of things without using a calendar. There are plenty of great calendar apps for Android that make planning ahead easier, but the challenge is using them effectively. If you’re really, really busy, you might put off adding a calendar entry for an upcoming event, which can lead to you forgetting about it entirely. To help you remember things, the new Google Pixel 9 series automatically turns your screenshots into a searchable database and can even proactively suggest adding events to your calendar.

Of the many new AI-focused features on the Google Pixel 9, the Pixel Screenshots app is perhaps the most useful. The app uses an on-device AI model to analyze each screenshot you take. Not only does it analyze the screenshot to extract text, but it also generates a description based on the image’s contents.

For example, if you take a screenshot of a pair of black sneakers that you plan to buy later, you can open the Pixel Screenshots app and type “black sneakers” into the search bar to find that screenshot. The Pixel Screenshots app will recognize that the image contains a pair of black sneakers, even if the exact words “black” or “sneakers” don’t appear anywhere in the image. This is thanks to the generative AI model called Gemini Nano with Multimodality, a large language model (LLM) that runs directly on the Pixel 9.

When you take a screenshot on the Pixel 9, the Pixel Screenshots app immediately starts analyzing it in the background unless it’s throttled due to the 15 screenshots per day limit. The screenshot preview in the overlay starts to glow while the image is analyzed. The usual buttons for editing the screenshot or taking a scrolling screenshot appear below the screenshot preview, but the Pixel Screenshots app also inserts a bell icon that lets you set a reminder to revisit the screenshot you just took.

Additionally, if there is a date anywhere in the screenshot, the Pixel Screenshots app even adds an “Add to Calendar” button in the screenshot overlay. Tapping it will open the Google Calendar app’s calendar entry view, with some of the event details already pre-filled. For example, when I took a screenshot of HONOR’s IFA 2024 keynote invitation and tapped “Add to Calendar,” the event’s date, start time, location, and title were already pre-filled. Of course, some details like time zone and title were entered incorrectly, but it still helps when adding a new calendar event.

This “Add to Calendar” button can also appear in the Pixel Screenshots app itself, as long as a date is visible in the screenshot. Other chips that can appear include “Search in Maps” if an address is visible, a Chrome chip that opens the web page in Google Chrome where the screenshot was taken, a Maps chip that opens the Google Maps app with the location where the screenshot was taken, and a YouTube chip that opens the YouTube app with the video where the screenshot was taken. These chips only appear because the apps in question have the AssistContent#setWebURI API, which also allows them to provide URLs for the Recents screen on Pixel phones. Hopefully more apps will use this API to make the Pixel Screenshots app even more useful in the future.