- A new Pixel Feature Drop has landed for Google’s phones
- This update includes new AI photo editing tools and Wicked theme packs
- It also includes AI-powered notification summaries, scam text alerts, and more
Following a recent leak, the next Pixel Feature Drop has now landed, and there’s a lot here to get stuck into.
For one thing, there are various AI upgrades, with you now able to get AI-powered notification summaries, so you can quickly catch up on messages without reading paragraphs of text. And Google promises that in December there will also be an update that lets you silence lower priority notifications.
Also on the AI front, you can now use Google’s Nano Banana AI model to edit images directly in Google Messages.
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But if you head to Google Photos then you’ll find the editing capabilities there are even more powerful than they used to be, as you can now ask the AI to make edits to specific people that you mention by name. So for example you could say “Remove Riley’s sunglasses, open my eyes, make Engel smile and open her eyes.” To do this though you first need ensure that you have ‘face groups’ set up for everyone you mention, so Google Photos can identify them.
Other updates in this Pixel Feature Drop include Wicked theme packs, letting you customize your Pixel with wallpapers, icons, sounds and GIFs inspired by the film, and there’s also a feature that will alert you to potential scams when you get chat notifications from many popular apps.
Also with this update you’ll get prioritized notifications from people you set as ‘VIPs’, and Google Maps now has a battery saving feature that lets you view a simplified layout, with only the key information. Google claims that using this layout could extend your phone’s battery life by up to four hours.
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Limited availability
It’s worth noting that sadly the scam alerts and personalized edits in Google Photos are currently only available in the US. There may be good reasons for this, but this uneven availability of features is something we hate to see.
Still, in more positive news on that front this update does bring some existing Pixel features to more regions. Now, users of the Google Pixel 9 or newer in the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and India can access AI-powered scam call detection.
Plus, Pixel users in the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Japan can now make use of Call Notes, which uses Gemini Nano on-device to record your calls, take notes, and create a transcript and summary of them.
So this is a fairly hefty update, and well worth downloading.
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