Google introduced on Thursday that it’s rolling out new AI and accessibility options to Android and Chrome. Most notably, TalkBack, Android’s display screen reader, now allows you to ask Gemini about what’s in photographs and what’s in your display screen.
Final 12 months, Google introduced Gemini’s capabilities to TalkBack to provide people who find themselves blind or have low imaginative and prescient entry to AI-generated descriptions for photographs, even when Alt textual content isn’t accessible. Now, individuals can ask questions and get responses about their photographs.
For instance, if a good friend texts you a photograph a their new guitar, you may get an outline of it and ask questions concerning the model and coloration. As well as, now you can get descriptions and ask questions on your complete cellphone display screen. So, when you’re buying in an app, you possibly can ask Gemini concerning the materials of an merchandise you’re all in favour of or if there’s a low cost accessible.
Google additionally introduced at the moment that it’s updating Expressive Captions, Android’s real-time captions function that makes use of AI to seize what somebody says, and the way they are saying it.
Google says it’s conscious that one of many methods individuals categorical themselves is by dragging out the sound of their phrases, which is why it has developed a brand new period function on Expressive Captions. Now, you’ll know if a sports activities announcer is looking out an “amaaazing shot” or when somebody isn’t merely saying “no” however “nooooo.” You’ll additionally begin to see new labels for sounds, similar to when an individual is whistling or clearing their throat.
The replace is rolling out in English within the U.S., U.Okay., Canada, and Australia for gadgets working Android 15 and above.
Google can be making it simpler to entry PDFs on Chrome. Till now, you wouldn’t be capable to use your display screen reader to work together with a scanned PDF in your desktop Chrome browser. Now, Chrome routinely acknowledges some of these PDFs, permitting you to spotlight, copy, and seek for textual content like another web page and use your display screen reader to learn them. That is due to the introduction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Google says.
Plus, Web page Zoom on Chrome on Android now allows you to improve the scale of the textual content you see with out affecting the web-page format. You’ll be able to customise how a lot you need to zoom in after which select to use the desire to the entire pages you go to, or simply sure ones. You’ll be able to entry this function by tapping the three-dot menu within the top-right nook of Chrome.
