Most AI of today are essentially chatbots. Gemini, ChatGPT and the like aren’t exactly integrated into phones yet to be proactively intelligent. As things are right now, you must invoke AI by opening the app first, until Google and Apple get better at integrating intelligence more deeply into the operating system.
But there’s a trick I use to directly send things to Gemini, whether I want to analyze an image, summarize an article on the web and ask questions about it, or do a quick translation. Using this method, you can quickly “pass” anything to Gemini (and this method also applies to other tools like ChatGPT, Grok, or Meta), whether images or websites or links or screenshots or even PDFs. Most people don’t even realize you can interact with Gemini in this way, and it saves a lot of time and avoids the need to save things or copy and paste them. I’m talking about using the share sheet (both in Android and iOS) to “beam” anything to Gemini and instantly begin a chat about it.
Sharing to Gemini
Use Android’s share sheet
Once you install Gemini to Android (and again, the same applies to ChatGPT, Grok, or any other AI), you’ll have a new entry in your share sheet such that anything shareable on Android (which is pretty much anything: images, screenshots, any webpage, any social media content) can be quickly and easily passed to Gemini. This is by far the fastest way to invoke Gemini and send content to it. Specifically, I like using it for three things: summarizing web pages, asking questions about images, and translating.
Summarize any website or article in seconds
I’m not a great reader. I’ve always struggled with attention because of ADD. When I need to read a long article lately, I pass it to Gemini and ask for a summary—which Gemini does beautifully by breaking it into main points. Then, you can ask specific questions about the content of the website or article, as if you’re asking an expert that has fully read and understood the subject matter. You can even ask Gemini to summarize a gigantic article in one sentence or one paragraph! This is a life-saver for someone like me that doesn’t have the attention span to read a long article, but Gemini will read it for me and summarize it.
On Android, you can “pin” your most used apps in the share sheet to keep the most important ones at the beginning of the list by tapping and holding on items in the sheet. On iOS, you can similarly customize Activity View by clicking “More” and then you can rearrange and customize what you see in the sharing panel.
Analyze and ask questions about any image or screenshot
Sending Gemini images is amazing. It understands context without you needing to explain what is in the image. For example, you can take a picture of a bug and say, “what does this bug eat?” or send a photo of a supercar and just say “how much is this?” or “how much horsepower does this have?” or even do something more advanced like take a picture of a faucet you’re trying to repair and say “how do I get this to stop leaking?” It’s like Google Lens (which was always just a conduit to Google reverse image search) on steroids.
- OS
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Android
- Developer
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Google
Translate anything
You can share anything to Gemini that needs translation, whether a webpage, an image, or a photo, and Gemini will auto-detect the language and translate it into your language. Gemini is smart enough not just to give you a literal translation of something, but to provide cultural context. For example, the Spanish phrase “estar en las nubes” translates literally to “to be in the clouds” but Gemini knows that it more closely translates to “distracted” in English and will present you with the more culturally-appropriate translation.
Fully benefit from artificial intelligence
I mainly use this on Android with Gemini via the share sheet, but the idea is universal: it works with other AIs (Grok, Meta AI, ChatGPT, etc.) and on iOS too. Using the iOS share sheet (the Activity View), you can send content straight to an AI without opening the app first.
What’s more, you can experiment with this paradigm and try to share many different things with Gemini. I’ve found that this also works well with documents and text files, videos, audio files and more. By far one of my favorite uses of this is to send Gemini a PDF, like a contract, and ask questions like “what is the process for canceling this contract?” or “explain section 5 in simple terms.”
AI is supposed to make us more productive, so it helps to remove friction wherever possible—and not let the slowest part of the process be us opening apps and copy-pasting.
