Chrome’s new ‘Skills’ feature is just bookmarking for Gemini prompts

Chrome dominates the browser market to an almost absurd degree, so it’s no surprise Google keeps shoving Gemini into every corner of it. The chatbot is already baked into the UI, and you can let it take over the browser entirely if you’re feeling adventurous. The latest addition is called “Skills,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a way to save your frequently used Gemini prompts so you don’t have to type them out every single time.

This isn’t some groundbreaking new capability. It’s more of a “finally” moment. Before Skills, if you wanted Gemini to do something repeatedly — summarize an article, check your calendar, whatever — you had to either retype the prompt or dig up a saved snippet and paste it in. That gets old fast. Skills just lets you save those prompts and access them with a click or a slash command.

On desktop, your saved Skills sync across devices as long as you’re logged into your Google account. To pull one up, you type / in the Gemini input field or click the plus button. Pick the Skill you want, and it runs on the current tab. If the Skill needs data from multiple tabs, you can add those too. It’s simple, and it works.

I’ve been using a similar workflow with a text expander tool for years, so I’m glad to see this built directly into Chrome. But let’s be honest: this is the kind of thing that should have been there from day one. Prompt reuse is not a novel concept. Bookmarking is not a novel concept. Combining them is not a novel concept. Google just took its sweet time getting here.

Still, it’s a welcome addition. If you use Gemini in Chrome regularly, Skills will save you a few seconds here and there. That adds up. And the cross-device sync means you don’t have to set everything up twice if you switch between work and personal machines.

What I’d really like to see next is the ability to share Skills or download them as a simple JSON file. Right now you’re locked into Google’s ecosystem, which is fine if you’re all-in, but annoying if you ever want to take your prompts elsewhere. Also, there’s no way to organize them into folders yet. That’s going to become a problem once you have more than a handful.

Overall, Skills is a small but useful quality-of-life improvement. It doesn’t change the game, but it makes the game a little less tedious. If you’re already using Gemini in Chrome, you’ll appreciate it. If you’re not, this probably won’t convince you to start.