Google today announced the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, its latest flagship smartphones featuring the new Google Tensor chipset. Google is making a big deal out of its first smartphone processor, as it's designed around AI, and it delivers much better machine learning performance. One area where this is particularly helpful is the camera. Google today unveiled a new feature called Magic Eraser for Pixel 6, which lets users remove unwanted distractions from the background of a photo.

Magic Eraser is fairly straightforward - you can select an object in a photo, and it will be deleted, with artificial intelligence filling in the space so that it fits with the rest of the background. What's unique about it is that it can also automatically detect objects in a picture that you may want to remove. For example, if it's clear that a picture is focused on a group of people that's close to the camera, Magic Eraser can suggest removing other people in the background.

This kind of feature isn't completely new, however. We've seen similar implementations in Samsung's Gallery app as well as other OEMs. However, with Google's Tensor chip and AI prowess, we can probably count on it to work even better here.

Aside from Magic Eraser, the Google Tensor chip enables other useful computational photography features on the Pixel 6, including computational video. With the Pixel 6, Google says it can now run HDRnet on 4K video at 60 frames per second. That means the processor can apply HDR enhancements to every frame of a video, matching the quality you'd usually only get from Pixel photography. This also allows for even smoother video stabilization at this resolution and frame rate.

The Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are both available to preorder today, and a full launch is coming on October 28th. The Pixel 6 starts at $599, and the Pixel 6 Pro starts at $899. If you're interested, you can check out our list of the best places to preorder the new Pixel phones.