So Google’s 2nd-gen Pixel Buds have been greeted w/ a mixed bag in its initial reviews. But w/ it being a Google product, it is subject to the same feature drops as on their Pixel smartphones. Today, they announced one that might fix a lot of the issues people had w/ it.
The new feature drop update will add a few features as well as fix several known issues. Google will be adding things like:
- Bass boost: toggle bass boost on in Pixel Buds settings to get more bass out of your Pixel Buds.
- Sharing detection: turn on sharing detection in Pixel Buds settings and your Pixel Buds will automatically detect when you share one of your earbuds with another person and allow you to individually swipe to control your own volume.
- Find My Device: in addition to being able to ring your Pixel Buds if they’re connected to your Android phone, you can now see their last known location on a map when they’re no longer connected. There is no active GPS tracking, but this can help you know where to get started if you’ve misplaced them.
- Translate transcribe mode: adding to the already available conversation mode which helps when you’re talking back and forth with another person, the new transcribe mode reads translated speech directly in your ear, helping you understand the gist of what’s being said during longer listening experiences. Transcribe mode is launching initially for French, German, Italian and Spanish speakers to translate English speech.
- Attention Alerts: an experimental feature that notifies you of important things happening around you—your dog barking, baby crying or an emergency vehicle driving by with sirens ringing—and lowers the volume of your content momentarily to alert you to what’s going on.
- More: Toggle to turn off/on touch controls and some useful Assistant commands
And the update will fix known issues like:
- Improved connection stability during calls
- Better auto-recovery when one or both earbuds lose connection
- Improved media playback stability for phones that have software audio encoding
- Fixed issue where one earbud fails to connect when removed from the case
In addition to all of this, the other colors are now available as well. Previously, it was only Just White but now you got Almost Black, Oh So Orange, & Quite Mint color options. The new update will begin rolling out today as well. It might be the perfect time to pick these up.
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