The Pixel 10 Has an AI-Powered ‘Camera Coach’ Feature That I Really Like
Yesterday at the Made by Google event, Google unveiled a number of new camera features that add AI to your photos. One of them allegedly lets you zoom in 100x . But there’s another AI-powered feature that doesn’t actually add AI to your final shot. Camera Coach is a feature that essentially tries to make sure your photos look perfect before you press the shutter, rather than trying to fix them after. As someone who’s still wary of AI-generated images , can I say this is the perfect blend of man and machine I’ve been waiting for?
How Camera Coach Works
Not everyone studied photography in school like I did, which means they may not be experts in basic concepts like the “rule of thirds” and “make sure your subject is in the frame.” Jokes aside, if you’ve ever handed your phone to a relative and tried (and failed) to help them take a photo of you, you’re the target audience for Camera Coach.
Basically, if you have a Pixel 10 device, you can point it at a subject, then tap the button in the top-right corner of the Camera app, and suddenly the phone’s AI becomes a makeshift cameraman. An interface will pop up with several potential AI-generated shots. Tap one, and you’ll get step-by-step instructions on how to take it, with the AI monitoring your screen and making suggestions as needed. Take the photo, and it’ll be saved as it appears on your lens, with no AI-generated images added to the final result.
Come up with ideas for new photos
Camera Coach mostly helps you frame and zoom, but there’s one case where the AI image generation plays a more important role. In addition to Camera Coach’s typical crop-based or pan-based suggestions, it also offers blue-lighted suggestions that ask you to “Get Inspired.” These use generative AI to suggest how your photo might look from a different angle or with more elements in the environment. The catch is that it can only intuitively assess what it saw through the camera lens, rather than knowing what’s there or not, so some of these shots may not be physically possible.
Luckily, if none of the Get Inspired offers or even the regular offers suit you, you can always hit the upgrade button to get more.
In a hands-on demo in a controlled environment, Get Inspired got the area around the opening frame pretty accurate, but since we were in a virtually empty soundstage, that’s not too surprising.
What will Camera Coach ask you to do?
If you decide to use Camera Coach, be prepared for work. Getting the perfect shot is as simple as raising or lowering your phone and zooming in a bit, but in my demo we had to crouch down and crab-walk a few feet. The app can be quite picky about getting the shot just right.
How safe is Camera Coach?
Camera Coach is powered by two different types of AI. First, there’s the built-in AI that never leaves your phone. That’s what you’ll see when you follow Camera Coach’s directions: the camera will monitor your screen to make sure you get the right shot.
But unlike most of Google’s other new AI features, Camera Coach also uses cloud-based AI. A Google spokesperson told me that Camera Coach will send a single frame to the cloud at the start of a session to “ensure the best possible processing,” but will discard it afterward. That shouldn’t pose a major security issue—Google won’t be training its AI on that frame—but it does mean you won’t be able to use Camera Coach without an internet connection.
Camera Coach Limitations
Contrary to my usual suspicions, I was quite impressed by Camera Coach’s recommendations. They’re not going to win you a Pulitzer Prize, but they’re a good way to help you understand the potential of your subject and how it might be improved by simply taking a step forward or back, or moving your subject slightly to the left. Considering the number of times my family has shot me in the center of the frame, blown out, and zoomed out, maybe someone else will find these recommendations useful.
I’m also glad that there’s no generative AI in your photos, so I can safely post them on social media without raising suspicions from my followers. As for the machine learning algorithm behind Camera Coach, Google told me that its team of photographers gave it both “good” and “bad” example photos and did their best to teach the AI to differentiate between them, so it appears there was significant human intervention in the backend.
At the same time, we still don’t know where Google got these training photos from, so the typical problems with generative AI remain , even if you can be sure that the final image won’t be hallucinatory. Camera Coach is also not suitable for quick shots, where the subject won’t be still in front of you long enough for the AI to figure out the best shot.