“Our goal is to be able to have it as customizable as possible, pulling from all sorts of data sources that you ask it to be able to create a custom widget for you,” Brooks says. Maybe that means creating a weather widget that shows Celsius and Fahrenheit for when you’re traveling abroad. Or a countdown to your next marathon. Or a widget that shows three new high-protein meal prep recipes every week.
What does this mean for the future of the home screen? Will we still have app grids? Or will every person’s phone have its own look and feel, drummed up by natural language? Brooks says Android has always been good at customization, so we should expect even more control over how our phones look and work. “I think you’ll see a lot more of that in the future on how we can continue to do this in a delightful way, to make your device truly yours.”
Rambler
Courtesy of Google
The voice dictation feature on Google’s Gboard keyboard is getting a Gemini upgrade. A new feature called Rambler smartens voice-to-text; Gemini will understand when you say “um,” “ah,” and “like,” and will remove those verbal fillers from your dictated text. If someone interrupts you while you’re dictating and you respond, Gemini will cut that part from your transcription so you don’t have to delete a bunch of words and start over.
The whole point is that you’re able to speak naturally, and the final result will be a trimmed version of what you want to say, minus the filler words we use in natural speech. That does mean Gemini does a little editing to massage the sentences by guessing at what it thinks you want to say. It works in multiple languages and is also multilingual, so if you frequently blend English and Spanish, it will switch between both in a single message. Google says audio is not stored or saved.
Screen Reactions
Courtesy of Google
Moving on from AI-focused improvements, Android 17 will debut an easy way to create a reaction video. You know those videos on social with the person in the corner talking and a webpage or app about what they’re reacting to in the background? You can now record yourself and your screen simultaneously without dealing with third-party apps or a green screen. This feature will roll out to Pixel devices first this summer.
Upgrades to Instagram and Edits
There’s a major collaboration with Meta in Android 17 to improve the Instagram camera experience. That includes adding Ultra HDR support for capture and playback, support for built-in video stabilization, and integration with your phone camera’s night mode. Instead of using your phone’s camera and then adding those images or videos to post on Instagram, the idea is that with these improvements, you can now rely on the native Instagram camera experience without losing image quality.
Another Meta partnership, Android 17 gets some exclusive tools in Instagram’s Edits app, like Smart Enhance, which uses on-device AI to upscale photos and videos. Sound separation will also separate audio tracks from wind, noise, and music, and let you boost sounds and cut out the stuff you don’t want to hear.
