Google debuted a bunch of new camera features that add AI to your photos during its Made by Google event yesterday, including one that claims to let you zoom in by 100 times—but there’s one other AI-powered addition that doesn’t actually add AI to your final photo. Called Camera Coach, it essentially tries to ensure your pictures look perfect before you click the shutter rather than trying to fix them up afterwards. As someone who’s still wary of AI-generated imagery, could this be the perfect blend of man and machine I’ve been waiting for?
How Camera Coach works
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Not everyone took a photography course in high school like I did, which means they may not also be experts in basic concepts like “the rule of thirds” and “make sure your subject is in frame.” Kidding aside, if you’ve ever handed your phone off to a family member and tried (and failed) to guide them through taking a photo of you, you’re Camera Coach’s target audience.
Essentially, if you have a Pixel 10 device, you can now point it at a subject, then click a button in the top right corner of the Camera app to suddenly have the phone’s AI become an impromptu cinematographer. This will pop up an interface with a number of potential shots you could take, generated by the AI. Click on one, and you’ll be guided through the steps you need to take it, with the AI watching your screen and offering advice as needed. Snap the photo, and it’ll save as it appears in your lens, with no AI imagery being added to your final result.
Come up with ideas for new photos
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Most of Camera Coach is just about helping you with framing and zooming, but there is one case where the AI image generation takes a more heavy role. Alongside Camera Coach’s typical suggestions, which rely on cropping or panning around what was already in your camera’s frame, it also throws in suggestions with a blue highlight around them that prompt you to “Get Inspired.” These use generative AI to guess at what your photo might look like from a different angle, or with more of the surrounding environment included. The catch is that it can only intuit what it has actually seen through your camera lens, rather than actually know what is and isn’t there, so some of these shots might not be physically possible.
Luckily, if none of the Get Inspired suggestions, or even the normal suggestions, appeal to you, you can always hit a refresh button to get more.
In a hands-on demo in a controlled environment, Get Inspired did pretty accurately guess at the area surrounding the initial shot, but since we were on a mostly blank sound stage, that’s not too surprising.
What will Camera Coach ask you to do?
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
If you decide to use Camera Coach, prepare to get on your feet. The steps to get the perfect shot can be as simple as moving your phone up or down and zooming in a bit, but in my demo, we actually had to crouch and kind of crab walk a couple of feet. It can be a bit picky about making sure the subject is where it wants it.
How secure is Camera Coach?
Camera Coach operates on two different kinds of AI. First, there’s on-device AI, which means it never leaves your phone. This is what you’ll see when you’re actually following the Coach’s directions, as it’ll watch your screen to try to ensure you get the right shot.
What do you think so far?
But unlike most of Google’s other new AI features, Camera Coach also relies on cloud-based AI. A Google spokesperson told me Camera Coach will send one frame to the cloud at the start of your session, to “ensure you get the best processing available,” but that it’ll delete your frame afterwards. It shouldn’t be too much of a security issue—Google won’t train its AI on that single frame—but it does mean you won’t be able to use Camera Coach if you don’t have a connection.
The limits of Camera Coach
Against all my usual suspicion, I was decently impressed with the suggestions Camera Coach made. You’re not going to win a Pulitzer with these, but it does a decent job of helping you realize the potential of what’s in front of you, and how it could be improved if you just took a step forward or back, or moved your subject just a little to the left. Given how many family members I’ve had just take zoomed out, overexposed photos of me in the dead center of the frame, maybe some folks could use the guidance.
I’m also happy that there’s no generative AI actually in your shots, so I can safely post them to social media without making my followers suspicious. As for the machine learning algorithm behind Camera Coach, Google told me its photography team fed it both “good” and “bad” example photos and did its best to teach the AI the difference, so it seems like there was significant human intervention in the backend.
At the same time, we still don’t know where Google got those training photos, so the typical concerns with generative AI apply, even if you can be sure there will be no hallucinations in your final image. Camera Coach also won’t work for quick shots, where the subject isn’t going to be sitting still in front of you long enough for the AI to figure out how to best frame it.