One of the new features in Android O that was recently announced at I/O is Smart Text Selection. Selecting the right text can be hard on a small screen, but Google's data shows that most of the time when we are selecting information it's something like an address or phone number. Now in Android O you can double tap text, and the selection automatically expands as needed. It even shows a convenient predictive shortcut so we can use it in another context, or save it. Of course, we can use the Assistant to do all those things if we remember, but it's good to have multiple ways of solving the same problem.

Now when you double tap on a relevant bit of text, Google's machine learning software is able to figure out where the relevant information starts and ends, and automatically selects all of it, rather than just the tiny part you tapped. It works for physical addresses, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and even suggests contextually relevant means of interacting with the data right next to the other options that appear like Cut and Format.

All of the information is processed on-device, so the privacy conscious need not worry too much, and from a technical level it's very cool that the machine learning software is snappy enough to do it all locally. All the tiny bits of precious time this can save will add up, even if you forget to use the Assistant.

Source: Google