Google announced On Thursday, which releases new AI features and accessibility to Android and Chrome. Specifically, the talkback, Android’s screen reader, now allows you to ask Gemini about what’s in the pictures and what’s on your screen.
Last year, Google has brought Gemini’s capabilities to talk to give people blind or have low vision access to AI descriptions for images, even when the ALT text is not available. Now, people can ask questions and receive answers about their pictures.
For example, if a friend sends you a photo a new guitar, you can get a description of it and ask questions about the brand and color. In addition, you can now receive descriptions and ask questions about the entire screen of your phone. So if you are shopping in an app, you can ask Gemini for the material of an object you are interested in or if a discount is available.
Google has also announced today that it is informing the expressive captions, the operation of the Android captions used by AI to capture what one is saying and how they say it.
Google says that it knows that one of the ways people express is the same, conveying the sound of their words, so it has developed a new duration of expressive captions. Now, you will know if an athletic announcer calls an “amaazing shot” or when someone does not just say “no” but “nooooo”. You will also begin to see new labels for sounds, such as when a person whistles or cleanses his neck.
Information is released in English in the US, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia for devices running Android 15 and above.
Google also facilitates PDF access to Chrome. So far, you could not use your screen reader to interact with a scanned PDF in the Chrome Desktop browser. Now, Chrome automatically recognizes these types of PDFS, allowing you to highlight, copy and search for text like any other page and use your screen reader to read them. This is thanks to the introduction of visual recognition (OCR), says Google.
In addition, the Zoom page on Chrome on Android now allows you to increase the size of the text you see without influenced the layout of the website. You can customize how much you want to enlarge and then choose to apply the preference to all the pages you visit or only some. You can access this feature by pressing the three -point menu in the upper right corner of Chrome.
