Google rolls out new AI and accessibility features to Android and Chrome

Google announced The new AI and accessibility functions for Android and Chrome were rolled out on Thursday. In particular Talkback, Android’s screen reader, let Gemini ask you what is in images and what is on your screen.

Last year, Google brought the possibilities of Gemini to talk to give people blind or low visibility access to AI-generated descriptions for images, even when ALT text is not available. Now people can ask questions and get answers to their images.

For example, if a friend texts you a photo of their new guitar, you can get a description of it and ask questions about the brand and the color. Moreover, you can now get descriptions and ask questions about your entire telephone screen. So if you shop in an app, you can ask Gemini about the material of an item in which you are interested or if a discount is available.

Google has also announced today that the expressive captions update, the real -time caption function of Android that uses AI to record what someone says and how they say it.

Google says it is aware that one of the ways in which people express themselves is to drag away the sound of their words, which is why it has developed a new endurance function on expressive captions. Now you will know if a sports broadcaster calls an “Amaaze -Schot” or when someone does not only say “no”, but “noooooo”. You also start to see new labels for sounds, such as when a person whistles or his throat scrapes.

The update is rolled out in English in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia for devices with Android 15 and higher.

Google also makes it easier to access PDFs on Chrome. So far you could not use your screen reader to communicate with a scanned PDF in your desktop chrome browser. Now Chrome automatically recognizes these types of PDFs so that you can mark, copy and search for text like any other page and use your screen reader to read them. This is due to the introduction of optical character recognition (OCR), says Google.

Moreover, you can now increase Page Zoom on Chrome on Android the size of the text that you see without influencing the layout of the webpage. You can adjust how much you want to zoom in and then choose to apply the preference on all pages you visit, or only certain. You can access this function by tapping the Three-Stip menu in the top right corner of Chrome.