Google Enhances Android and Chrome with Innovative AI and Accessibility Features

On Thursday, Google announced the introduction of new artificial intelligence and accessibility features within Android and Chrome. Notably, the TalkBack screen reader on Android now allows users to inquire about the content of images displayed on their screens with the help of Gemini.

Last year, Google integrated Gemini capabilities into TalkBack, enhancing access to AI-generated image descriptions for individuals with visual impairments, even when alternative text is unavailable. Users can now ask questions and receive answers about their images.

For instance, if a friend sends you a photo of their new guitar, you can request a description and inquire about its brand and color. Additionally, you can now ask questions and receive descriptions for everything displayed on your phone screen. So, if you’re shopping within an app, you can ask Gemini about the material of a product or whether there is a discount available.

Today, Google also revealed updates to the Expressive Captions feature in Android, which uses AI to interpret the nuances of speech.

Google acknowledges that one way people express themselves is by elongating sounds within words, leading to the development of a new duration detection feature in Expressive Captions. This means you will now be able to discern when a sports commentator exclaims «amazing goal!» in a drawn-out manner or when someone responds with an exaggerated «nooo.» Additionally, you will start to see new designations for sounds, such as whistling or coughing.

This update is available in English across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia for devices running Android 15 and later versions.

Google is also improving PDF accessibility in Chrome. Previously, users could not utilize screen readers to interact with scanned PDF files in the Chrome browser on desktop. Now, Chrome automatically recognizes these types of PDFs, allowing you to highlight, copy, and search text as you would on any other web page, enabling screen reader functionality for viewing them. This improvement is made possible through the implementation of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), as reported by Google.

Additionally, the «Page Scaling» feature in Chrome on Android now allows users to enlarge text without altering the layout of the web page. You can customize the scaling level and choose to apply these changes to all pages you visit or just specific ones. To access this feature, click on the three-dot menu in the top right corner of Chrome.

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