A separate Pixel Drop adds a handful of new AI-boosted features to the latest Pixel phones.
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.
