Google announced 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 helps you to ask Gemini about what’s in pictures and what’s in your display screen.

Final yr, Google introduced Gemini’s capabilities to TalkBack to present people who find themselves blind or have low imaginative and prescient entry to AI-generated descriptions for pictures, even when Alt textual content isn’t obtainable. Now, folks can ask questions and get responses about their pictures.

For instance, if a buddy texts you a photograph a their new guitar, you may get an outline of it and ask questions in regards to the model and colour. As well as, now you can get descriptions and ask questions on your complete cellphone display screen. So, should you’re procuring in an app, you possibly can ask Gemini in regards to the materials of an merchandise you’re involved in or if there’s a low cost obtainable.

Google additionally introduced immediately 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 folks categorical themselves is by dragging out the sound of their phrases, which is why it has developed a brand new length function on Expressive Captions. Now, you’ll know if a sports activities announcer is asking out an “amaaazing shot” or when somebody isn’t merely saying “no” however “nooooo.” You’ll additionally begin to see new labels for sounds, comparable 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 units operating Android 15 and above.

Google can be making it simpler to entry PDFs on Chrome. Till now, you wouldn’t have the ability to use your display screen reader to work together with a scanned PDF in your desktop Chrome browser. Now, Chrome mechanically acknowledges some of these PDFs, permitting you to focus on, copy, and seek for textual content like some other 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 helps you to enhance the dimensions of the textual content you see with out affecting the web-page structure. You possibly can customise how a lot you wish to zoom in after which select to use the choice to the entire pages you go to, or simply sure ones. You possibly can entry this function by tapping the three-dot menu within the top-right nook of Chrome.