Your older Pixel phone is getting these 4 useful, AI-powered accessibility upgrades
Some big improvements
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In the wake of another hugeMade by Google event– check out ourPixel 9 Pro hands-onandPixel Watch 3 hands-onfor some of the details –Googlehas also pushed out some significant AI-powered upgrades for Pixel phones old and new.
There are four upgrades in total, as outlined in ablog postby Google. First is Guided Frame, which gives spoken guidance when users are framing a shot – saying when there’s a face in the frame, and even warning about low light, for example.
Guided Frame has been around for a while to help those with impaired vision, but it’s moving from the Accessibility settings in Android and will now be available from the main camera settings. Previously, you needed to enable the screen reader to get to it.
In addition, Google is promising improvements in object recognition, face filtering in group photos, and object focus. It should mean a more useful and more accurate Guided Frame experience that’s easier to get to.
Next, the Pixel-exclusive Magnifier feature – that essentially lets you use your phone camera like a powerful magnifier to better see the world around you – is getting better, too. A new selfie mode is being added, which helps when touching up make-up, for example.
The Magnifier is also getting the ability to search for certain words in your surroundings (like an airport gate number), a picture-in-picture mode so you can still see the wider context, and the ability to swap between camera lenses.
Captions and transcriptions
Next up we’ve got Live Caption (which captions videos on Android in real-time, using AI) and Live Transcribe (which works in a similar way, but turns spoken audio into text while instantly translating it).
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Seven new languages are being added to both these features – Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Vietnamese – together with offline access for Live Transcribe, so you can use them in foreign climes without an internet connection.
If you’ve got a foldable phone – maybe something like the brand newGoogle Pixel 9 Pro Fold, perhaps – then there’s a new dual-screen mode for Live Transcribe as well. It means one screen can show one language, while around the back of the phone the other display shows the other language.
“With dual-screen mode, you can easily set your phone in a tabletop posture on any surface for better visibility of transcriptions,“says Google. “Now everyone around the table can follow the conversation – whether you’re attending a meeting or having a dinner conversation with friends.”
It’s not clear from Google’s blog posts which older Pixel phones are getting these features, but presumably if they’re already available on your handset at the moment, you’ll be getting the updates when they roll out. For the Magnifier feature specifically, available through theGoogle Play Store, you’ll need a Pixel 5 or up.
We’re still picking through all the announcements from the Made by Google event, as well as forming our thoughts on the new hardware Google has unveiled. We also saw some pretty major updates forthe Google Gemini AI assistant.
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Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you’ll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.
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