(Credit: Google)
Google’s latest assortment of Android updates, rolling out now, share one common thread: elevating ways to communicate beyond the onscreen keyboards on our phones.
Google’s announcement leads off with Expressive Captions, an update to the captioning features first shipped in Android 10 to capture more of people’s non-verbal nuances.
“You’ll see things like the [whispering] of a juicy secret, the [cheers and applause] of a big win and the [groaning] after a dad joke,” Google explains. It does not specify how this feature would handle somebody swearing at their computer in a fit of nerd rage, so we’ll have to research that ourselves.
In a similar vein, Google’s Gemini AI platform will lend more of a hand to Lookout, the image-description app the company launched in 2019, by providing “even richer, more helpful image descriptions” that Lookout will read aloud in a synthesized voice.
Item three in Google’s post highlights a new batch of pizza-themed emoji combinations available in Android’s Emoji Kitchen in what looks a bit like a blatant play for the pizza snobs in PCMag’s New York offices. But there’s also vague news of an upgrade to the gesture-typing option in Google’s Gboard app: a “new glide typing keyboard Clearflow, optimized for speed and accuracy.”
Quick Share, Google’s rough answer to Apple’s AirDrop, will gain a media-sharing shortcut in the form of QR codes you can invoke from Android’s share menu: Select the picture, video, or other file you want to offer, choose the code, and have the recipient scan that to kick off the Quick Share process without having to fuss with adding that person to your contacts or either of you changing any sharing defaults.
If you use your phone’s camera to capture documents and upload the results to Google Drive, that cloud storage service will now pitch in with automatic image edits to “improve contrast and white balance, and remove shadows and blurring.”
Finally, apps can invoke Gemini’s help by developing extensions that call on that AI assistance. Google cites one just shipped for Spotify that can help put together playlists for a particular mood–perhaps, if you’ve just finished swearing at your computer in a fit of nerd rage?
December Pixel Drop
Google’s Android news Thursday also includes a separate Pixel Drop of bonus features for the company’s own line of Android mobile devices. Coming less than two months after the previous Pixel Drop, this one seems thin in comparison. Many of the features Google touts, such as Expressive Captions and Gemini expressions, also show up in today's announcement. As with the broader set of Android features, these are rolling out to supported devices starting Thursday.
But people with Pixel 9 series phones are in line to get some more AI assistance with automatic replies in the phone app’s Call Screen mode, automatic categorization of screenshots that includes a shortcut to save screengrabs of things found via Circle to Search, and another shortcut to turn screenshots of tickets, passes and credit cards into Google Wallet items.
Pixel Watch users, meanwhile, will be able to get a live look at video from a Nest Doorbell or Cam by tapping on a notification of somebody outside from either camera. Google is also expanding its “Loss of Pulse Detection" Pixel Watch 3 feature, already available in most European countries, to Germany and Portugal; German Pixel Watch users will also get Fall Detection and Car Crash Detection activated.
This Pixel Drop wraps up with two other additions to Google’s largest Pixel device, the Pixel Tablet: support for Google’s VPN service and lockscreen widgets.