Android announced five updates on Tuesday as part of the latest release of its mobile operating system, with new features available on smartphones, tablets and Wear OS watches including audio description of images, text-to-speech technology for web pages in Chrome and the ability to find songs with “Circle to Search.”
As first announced in May, all Android users will now officially get TalkBack, an accessibility feature for the blind and low vision. The feature is Google's version of a screen reader that provides detailed audio descriptions of digital images. TalkBack is powered by Gemini Nano, Google's large-scale language model-based platform. Users can now hear descriptions of all kinds of images, including online products, photos in their camera roll, and even photos in text messages.
Another new accessibility feature is “Listen to this page.” This feature allows users to listen to web pages, such as blog posts, news articles, and recipes, in their Chrome browser. This feature is useful for people with visual impairments, learning disabilities, and those who prefer listening to reading. Users can pause, rewind, and fast forward, as well as set their preferred listening speed, language, and audio type. It supports multiple languages, including English, French, German, Arabic, Hindi, and Spanish.
Google's Circle to Search feature, announced earlier this year, allows users to search anywhere on their phone with gestures like circling, highlighting, scribbling, tapping, etc. With this feature, Android users can now search for songs with the new music button, eliminating the need to open a third-party app like Shazam. Users can launch Circle to Search by simply long-pressing the home button or navigation bar.
The new music feature can identify songs playing from your phone or in the background from nearby speakers, and not only will it show you the track and artist name, it can also direct you to a music video via the YouTube app.
According to some Reddit users, the music feature has been gradually rolling out to Samsung device users over the past few weeks.
Android's earthquake alert system has been available for some time, but it's now expanding to all U.S. states and six territories. First deployed in California in 2020, the system uses smartphone sensors to detect shaking and help people prepare for natural disasters and emergencies. For earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or greater, Android will issue two types of alerts: a warning if it detects light shaking, and an alert recommending a more immediate response if it detects more severe shaking.
Android smartwatch users can now use Offline Maps, a Google Maps feature that helps you navigate if you forget your phone, get lost, or have no cellular signal. Watch OS also introduces two new shortcuts that allow users to use their voice to search for a destination or see their location on the map with a quick tap on the watch face.
These features will be released alongside Android 15 and will roll out to more devices, including Pixel devices, later this year.