Selection Toolbar
Highlight any text in a Gemini conversation and a small toolbar appears above it. Six possible actions, all operating on exactly what you selected.
Gemini only. AI Studio's conversation structure doesn't support it yet.
The Actions
Each has its own switch in Settings → UI Controls → Selection Toolbar, plus a master switch for the whole thing. Turn off the ones you don't use — a toolbar with three buttons is faster to hit than one with six.
Reference
The most useful one, and the least obvious.
Highlight a specific claim in a long answer, click Reference, and it goes into your input box as a quote. Then type your follow-up.
The problem it solves: in a long answer, "what did you mean by that?" is ambiguous. The model has to guess which part you mean, and often guesses wrong. Quoting the exact sentence removes the guesswork.
This is the fix for the most common failure mode of long AI answers — you want to push back on one specific point, but referring to it costs a paragraph of setup. Highlight, Reference, ask. Two seconds, zero ambiguity.
Explain and Summarize
Explain sends the selection back with a request to unpack it. Good for a term or a step you didn't follow, without derailing into a fresh conversation.
Summarize is off by default because it's the less common of the two — most people are selecting something they didn't understand rather than something too long. Turn it on if you regularly select big blocks.
Save as Snippet
Precision saving. The whole-answer Save as Snippet button keeps everything; this keeps just the part worth keeping.
Formatting is preserved — headings, lists, code blocks all survive. Snippets land in your inbox.
The title is taken from the surrounding text, which produces awkward titles. See Snippets for how to fix them in bulk.
Save as Prompt
For the opposite case: you improvised a good instruction, or the model produced a phrasing you want to reuse as an input. It goes to your prompts inbox, and from there it's available via /.
Watch for this one in your own behaviour. When you find yourself writing a genuinely well-constructed request mid-conversation, that's a prompt. Highlight your own message, Save as Prompt, and you have it forever instead of half-remembering it next month.
Copy
Copies the selection with its Markdown formatting intact. Different from a normal browser copy, which tends to flatten structure or bring along styling you don't want.
Turning It Off
Master switch: Settings → UI Controls → Selection Toolbar.
Worth turning off if you select text a lot for reasons that aren't about acting on it — reading with your cursor, for instance — and find a popup appearing every time annoying.
Related
- Snippets — where saved selections go
- Prompts — where saved phrasings go
- Smart Scrollbar — jump to a message, then select from it