Google Gives My Phone Habits The Right Boost With These 3 New Android Features

The latest from Google Android app new shown Gemini traits that, for the first time, I’m happy to have AI in me the phone — and nothing that involves producing soulless images or summarizing things (seriously, we can stop summarizing everything).

New Android 17 features prioritize personalization and intuitive design. They realize that phone use varies from person to person. That’s why seeing Google show off features to speed up a few useful things and prioritize how I take breaks on my phone is great to see.

These three Android 17 features are my favorite announcements, and that’s why I think they’ll change the way I use mine Android phones.

Watch this: The biggest AI review for Android: Everything you need to know about Gemini Intelligence

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1. Personal speech-to-text Rambler

Speech-to-text has been around for a few years, and Rambler’s new feature uses AI to power it. Instead of me tapping into the microphone and saying word for word what I want to say, the feature will use Gemini to capture key parts of what I’m saying to create a concise message. But that’s not the best part; Google is using its leadership in translation and language understanding to build this for multilingual people.

As someone who speaks both English and Hindi in daily life, most of my interactions are a mixture of both languages. Rambler can easily switch between languages ​​within a single message, Google says. It uses Gemini’s advanced multilingual model, allowing it to understand context and nuance. So, if you combine two languages ​​in a speech (English and Hindi, for me), it can easily convert your message into text in the way you intended.

The Wispr Flow app can do the same to some extent, too. But the Google version is more promising because it has all my data, which can be used for personalized recommendations. Hopefully, that means it can create sentences that sound like how I speak and messages that are always natural and personal to me.

Personalization is important to me because I don’t want to sound like a robot in any of my written communications. I don’t currently use AI tools to speak to text because I want my writing to continue to convey my personality. I hope Rambler can retain the enthusiasm, fun, emotion and ugliness of my writing. If possible, this would be the first feature of speech and writing that I could use in everyday life.

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2. Pause Point to stop using the autopilot app

Google’s new Pause Point feature doesn’t use any AI, but it can be even more useful to stop yourself from doomscrolling. Picking up my phone, seeing a notification and being locked out of social media happens to me more often than I realize, and it has made me more aware of my phone usage.

Pause Point will give you a 10-second breather whenever you open a distracting app. (I’ll set it up for Instagram and X.) During that time, you can do some short breathing exercises or set a timer to avoid scrolling for too long. You can also use this 10-second pause to view some favorite photos or skip to other app suggestions. I’d love to be prompted with my favorite playlist whenever I click on Instagram out of habit.

Since our power is not enough to stop us (I know mine is not enough), Google makes it difficult to disable Pause Point once it is set. If you want to turn off the feature, you will need to restart your phone. This is going to be frustrating, but I’m up for anything that helps me stop using my autopilot app.

3. Create My Widget for custom widgets

Whenever I move from a Samsung Galaxy phoneI miss having a transparent Calendar widget next to the multi-city clock on my home screen. I need it on all my phones, regardless of the Android skin I’m using. And Android 17 will finally let me create custom widgets the way I like.

Create My Widget is another feature based on Gemini Intelligence that can help personalize your phone more than ever. You can create custom widgets by describing what you want using natural language. Google’s example includes a meal prepper who can ask the Create My Widget to “Recommend three high-protein meal recipes each week,” and it will create a custom dashboard they can add to their home screen.

I can see myself building a dashboard that contains multiple time zone clocks, travel information and (maybe) sleep data from me. Oura Ring 4all in one place. I hope it can connect with more apps to create such widgets. Google will roll out the Create My Widget feature across its various platforms, including Wear OS and Googlebooks.