A few months ago, Pixel owners got a few new, helpful features in our first feature drop. Beginning today, even more updates and new experiences will begin rolling out to Pixel users.
Help when you need it
You can already use Motion Sense to skip forward or go back to a previous song. Now, if you have a Pixel 4, you can also pause and resume music with a tapping gesture above the phone. So you can easily pause music when you're having a conversation, without even picking up your phone.
We’re also rolling out some helpful features to more Pixel devices. Now Live Caption, the technology that automatically captions media playing on your phone, will begin rolling out to Pixel 2 owners.
More fun with photos and video
New AR effects you can use live on your Duo video call with friends make chatting more visually stimulating. These effects change based on your facial expressions, and move with you around the screen. Duo calls now come with a whole new layer of fun.
Selfies on Pixel 4 are getting better, too. Your front-facing camera can now create images with depth, which improves Portrait Blur and colour pop, and lets you create 3D photos for Facebook.
Emoji on Pixel will now be a more customizable and inclusive thanks to the emoji 12.1 update, with 169 new emoji to represent a wider variation of gender and skin tones, as well as more couple combinations to better reflect the world around us.
Pixel is making it faster to pick the right card when using Google Pay. Just press and hold the power button to swipe through your debit and credit cards, event tickets, boarding passes or access anything else in Google Pay. This feature will be available to users in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Taiwan and Singapore. If you have Pixel 4, you can also quickly access emergency contacts and medical information.
Customize your Pixel’s look and feel
A number of system-level advancements will give Pixel users more control over the look and feel of their devices.
You may know that Dark theme looks great and helps save battery power. Starting today, Dark theme gets even more helpful and flexible in switching from light to dark background, with the ability to schedule Dark theme based on local sunrise and sunset times.
Pixel 4 users are also getting some unique updates to the way they engage with the content on their phone. Improved long press options in Pixel’s launcher will get more and faster help from your apps. There’s also an update to Adaptive brightness, which now temporarily increases screen brightness to make reading content easier when in extremely bright ambient lighting, like direct sunlight. Check out more options for customizing your screen options.
Here’s to better selfies, more emoji and a quick pause when you need it! Check out our support page for more information on the new features, and look out for more helpful features dropping for Pixel users soon.
