Adaptive brightness on Chrome OS isn’t the best ever. If you look at the official documentation on the Chromium OS website, things are very basic. I don’t think this page is up-to-date, but you get the basic idea.

The Pixelbook is said to have an advanced version of adaptive brightness. It can handle up to seven different levels of brightness.

However, are we going to get the Android-like ML-driven adaptive brightness? Read on!

Google has been working on “On device adaptive brightness” for a while now and with today’s update to the Canary channel of Chrome OS, we have a new flag to test this feature.

The flag is named “Auto Screen Brightness model”. According to the description it “uses Auto Screen Brightness model to adjust screen brightness based on ambient light“

The work started back in September 2018 based on the first code commit on this project and we finally have something that we can test.

I enabled this flag and restarted my Pixelbook, but could not see any difference a least in today’s build. I will have to observe how things work in the coming days and weeks.

It is interesting to note that they haven’t used the word “Adaptive” anywhere. Adaptive brightness is an Android feature that “learns” from your usage and adjusts screen brightness using that information and also the ambient sensors.

Will we get the same level of AI driven auto brightness on Chromebooks too? Maybe?

Machine Learning – Check

I can’t say for sure if we will get the Android-like AI driven adaptive brightness on Chromebooks. However, I can say this, based on some of the code comments, there is definitely some Machine Learning at play here.

Here is an example:

These code commits mention a “Global curve” which I assume is the default behavior or the auto brightness model and a “Personal curve” which is the customized auto brightness model for the user based on the way she adjusts the screen brightness throughout the day.

If you look at these code commits, it kind of feels like we are going to see the Android-like adaptive brightness on Chrome OS too.

What do you think? Is this where we are going? Are you excited?