Ahead of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities last Sunday, Apple released a short film that showcased its Personal Voice accessibility feature, which debuted earlier this year in iOS 17. Personal Voice allows users to create digital versions of their voice to use on calls, supported apps and Apple’s own Live Speech tool.

For those who are at risk of permanently losing their voice due to conditions like Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS and vocal cord paralysis, not sounding like yourself can be yet another form of identity loss. Being able to create a copy of your voice while you’re still able might help alleviate the feeling that you’ll never feel like yourself again, or that your loved ones won’t know what you sound like.

All iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma users can create a personal voice in case you need it in the future — whether temporarily or for long-term use. I found the process (on my iPhone 14 Pro) pretty straightforward and was surprisingly satisfied with my voice. Here’s how you can set up your own Personal Voice, as long as you’ve upgraded to iOS 17, iPadOS 17 or macOS Sonoma (on Macs with Apple Silicon).

Before you start the process, make sure you have a window of about 30 minutes. You’ll be asked to record 150 sentences, and depending on how quickly you speak, it could take some time. You should also find a quiet place with minimal background sound and get comfortable. It’s also worth having a cup of water nearby and making sure your phone has at least 30 percent of battery.

How to set up Personal Voice on iPhone

When you’re ready, go to the Personal Voice menu by opening Settings and finding Accessibility > Personal Voice (under Speech). Select Create A Personal Voice, and Apple will give you a summary of what to expect. Hit Continue, and you’ll see instructions like “Find a quiet place” and “Take your time.”

Importantly, one of the tips is to “Speak naturally.” Apple encourages users to “read aloud at a consistent volume, as if you’re having a conversation.” After you tap Continue on this page, there is one final step where your phone uses its microphone to analyze the level of background noise, before you can finally start reading prompts.

The layout for the recording process is fairly intuitive. Hit the big red record button at the bottom, and read out the words in the middle of the page. Below the record button, you can choose from “Continuous Recording” or “Stop at each phrase.”

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In the latter mode, you’ll have to tap a button each time you’ve recorded a phrase, while Continuous is a more hands-free experience that relies on the phone to know when you’re done talking. For those with speech impairments or who read slowly, the continuous mode could feel too stressful. Though it happened just once for me, the fact that the iPhone tried to skip ahead to the next phrase before I was ready was enough for me to feel like I needed to be quick with my reactions.

Personal Voice on iOS 17: First impressions

Still, for the most part the system was accurate at recognizing when I was done talking, and offered enough of a pause that I could tap the redo button before moving to the next sentence. The prompts mostly consisted of historical and geographical information, with the occasional expressive exclamation thrown in. There’s a fairly diverse selection of phrases, ranging from simple questions like “Can you ask them if they’re using that chair?” to forceful statements like “Come back inside right now!” or “Ouch! That is really hot!”

I found myself trying to be more exaggerated when reading those particular sentences, since I didn’t want my resulting personal voice to be too robotic. But it was exactly when I was doing that when I realized the problem inherent to the process. No matter how well I performed or acted, there would always be an element of artifice in the recordings. Even when I did my best to pretend like something was really hot and hurt me, it still wasn’t a genuine reaction. And there’s definitely a difference between how I sound when narrating sentences and having a chat with my friends.

That’s not a ding on Apple or Personal Voice, but simply an observation to say that there is a limit to how well my verbal self can be replicated. When you’re done with all 150 sentences, Apple explains that the process “may need to complete overnight.” It recommends that you charge and lock your iPhone, and your Personal Voice “will be generated only while iPhone is charging and locked” and that you’ll be alerted when it’s ready to use. It’s worth noting that in this time, Apple is training neural networks fully on the device to generate text-to-speech models and not in the cloud.

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In my testing, after 20 minutes of putting down my iPhone 14 Pro, only 4 percent of progress was made. Twenty more minutes later, the Personal Voice was only 6 percent done. So this is definitely something you’ll need to allocate hours, if not a whole night, for. If you’re not ready to abandon your device for that long, you can still use your phone — just know that it will delay the process.

When your Personal Voice is ready, you’ll get a notification and can then head to settings to try it out. On the same page where you started the creation process, you’ll see options to share your voice across devices, as well as to allow apps to request to use it. The former stores a copy of your voice in iCloud for use in your other devices. Your data will be end-to-end encrypted in the transfer, and the recordings you made will only be stored on the phone you used to create it, but you can export your clips in case you want to keep a copy elsewhere.

How to listen to and use Personal Voice

You can name your Personal Voice and create another if you prefer (you can generate up to three). To listen to the voice you’ve created, go back to the Speech part of the accessibility settings, and select Live Speech. Turn it on, choose your new creation under Voices and triple click your power button. Type something into the box and hit Send. You can decide if you like what you hear and whether you need to make a new Personal Voice.

At first, I didn’t think mine sounded expressive enough, when I tried things like “How is the weather today?” But after a few days, I started entering phrases like “Terrence is a monster” and it definitely felt a little more like me. Still robotic, but it felt like there was just enough Cherlynn in the voice that my manager would know it was me calling him names.

With concerns around deepfakes and AI-generated content at an all-time high this year, perhaps a bit of artifice in a computer-generated voice isn’t such a bad thing. I certainly wouldn’t want someone to grab my phone and record my digital voice saying things I would never utter in real life. Finding a way to give people a sense of self and improve accessibility while working with all the limits and caveats that currently exist around identity and technology is a delicate balance, and one that I’m heartened to see Apple at least attempt with Personal Voice.

The green bubble-blue bubble divide may be getting smaller soon. 9to5Mac is reporting that Apple has confirmed it will support the RCS messaging standard that it's long eschewed. That's not to say that messages from Android devices will no longer appear green on Apple's iMessage app. It does mean that texts from iPhones to non-iPhones will support the newer Rich Communication Services protocol, meaning they will not have to go through the aging SMS system.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Apple's latest earnings report paints a picture of software wins amid a hardware slump. In a statement announcing the financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter, the company called out a new all-time high for revenue from its Services products. It also highlighted iPhone revenue as having set a September quarter record. However, this marks the fourth consecutive quarter of overall revenue decline, with its earnings of $89.5 billion representing a 1 percent drop year over year. This also means the record-breaking performances of the iPhone and Services divisions did little to offset weakness elsewhere. 

The lackluster performance is somewhat understandable, though. The company just had a launch event for its new M3 chips, MacBooks and an iMac this week, none of which can be bought yet. And though the new iPhone 15 lineup and Apple Watches were introduced in September, sales of those devices likely did not account for much of this fiscal quarter’s results. We're also anticipating a November release for new iPads this year, which could further fuel hardware revenue. 

Correspondingly, the Mac, iPad and wearables divisions were down this quarter, with the first two taking noticeable hits. Though Apple drummed up significant interest with the Vision Pro headset earlier this year, that device is far from ready to be sold to the public and is unlikely to hit the market until 2024 at the earliest. With holiday shopping about to ramp up, as well as more product releases on the horizon, it’s much more likely that the company’s hardware products will have a greater impact on its bottom line next quarter.

Being stressed is not usually a good thing. But when you’re reviewing a high-profile smartwatch that touts stress-tracking as one of its most noteworthy new features, experiencing stress can be helpful. During the time I tested the Pixel Watch 2, I was going through a lot emotionally. I was maid of honor at our senior commerce editor’s wedding, had a family funeral to think about and was getting updates on the results of my best friend’s cancer diagnosis. Add to that the frenzy of Google’s hardware launch event and a super tight deadline for this review, and my mental landscape became the perfect testing scenario for the Pixel Watch 2’s body-response sensor.

That’s not the only new feature Google is bringing to its sophomore smartwatch. The company also updated the heart rate sensor, added a skin-temperature sensor, made the case lighter and used a more powerful processor that should prolong battery life. Though the Pixel Watch 2 doesn’t look like a major upgrade on the outside, it promises some improvements that should make daily use meaningfully better.

Pixel Watch 2: Design

As much as I adore the Pixel Watch 2’s round, shiny case and how it feels, one thing sticks out. Literally. The crown on the right side of the case juts out and is extremely easy to trigger when bending your hand backwards – I’ve already accidentally summoned the emergency SOS menu twice.

It also gets in the way when I’m working out, especially while doing push-ups or on a stationary bike. The solution for this is to adjust the watch so the screen is on the inside of your wrist, but even then I’ve accidentally pressed the knob once. To be fair, I also have to do this with the Apple Watch, especially the Ultra, but the dial on Google’s wearable just feels a bit more in the way.

Thankfully, the accidental pushes don’t happen often enough to completely ruin my workouts, and I otherwise love the Pixel Watch 2’s aesthetic. In the year since I reviewed the original, I’ve become more adept at swapping out bands using Google’s press-and-twist mechanism and can switch out the boring gray sport band I received for something nicer, like the slim black metal strap that I saw at the Pixel launch event.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

On paper, the watch is five whole grams lighter than its predecessor, which had a stainless steel case. This year’s model is made from recycled aluminum, and I have yet to scratch or damage it. Though it uses a less durable material, the new Pixel Watch has an IP68 rating for dust- and water-resistance, as well as the same 5 ATM water (pressure) resistance as the original. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch Series 9 has similar parameters, with an IP6X rating (dust-resistance only) and the ability to withstand up to 50 meters of submersion in water. The lightest model of the Series 9 also weighs about a gram more than the Pixel Watch 2.

Like it did last year, Google only offers the Pixel Watch 2 in one size: 41mm. For my relatively petite wrist and decent eyesight, this felt adequate. I had little trouble aiming at onscreen buttons, but I imagine there are probably people who wish this came in a larger size.

A key part of the Pixel Watch 2’s updated design is on the underside of its case. It houses three new sensors — a multi-path heart rate reader, a skin temperature sensor and a continuous electrodermal activity (cEDA) sensor. The heart rate scanner is supposed to be more accurate since it has multiple diodes compared to a single LED in the middle. While I was initially concerned that that potentially meant increased contact with my wrist, which could be uncomfortable, I didn’t feel a noticeable difference.

Heart-rate and fitness tracking

The updated sensor array means the Pixel Watch 2 can track even more of your physiological data than before, like your overnight skin temperature and number of minutes a day you had a “body response.”

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

I’ll explain that latter term in a bit. But I want to point out that, because you need to wear the device to bed for at least three nights before you can get a body temperature measurement, I have yet to see a result. For one thing, I’ve been traveling over the weekend and forgot to bring the Pixel Watch 2’s charger, and on other nights I prioritized plugging the device so I could test it the next day. (I also hate wearing a watch to bed.)

With the new heart rate sensor, the Pixel Watch 2 is supposed to deliver more-accurate readings during vigorous activities, which should mean I’m getting a better report on my HIIT sessions.

I’ve been wearing the Pixel Watch 2 alongside the Apple Watch Series 9 to all my workouts this week, and they generally showed similar results. It’s worth mentioning that you still have to use the Fitbit app to view your stats from Google’s watch. On devices by Samsung and Apple, you’ll just use the native health apps. Oh, and a quick aside: The AI chatbot that Google showed off at its keynote last week won’t be available in the Fitbit app until 2024 at the earliest.

On the Pixel Watch itself, you’ll have to launch the Fitbit Exercise app or set up a tile to start a workout session. To see your data on your wrist, you’ll use the Fitbit Today app. I get that Fitbit doesn’t want to disappear into the Google ecosystem, but this still makes the Pixel Watch 2 feel a little disjointed compared to its competitors.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

On my HIIT sessions, both Apple and Fitbit showed my duration and average heart rate as the exact same number. But they differed on stats like calories burned and how long I spent in each cardio zone. The Pixel Watch 2 tended to say I spent more time in “vigorous” and “moderate” ranges, while the Series 9 determined I hung out more in “Zone 1,” “Zone 3” and “Zone 4.” Apple clearly labels the number of beats per minute each of those zones include, while Fitbit doesn’t.

Based on my memory of these workouts (and how out of breath I felt), I think Apple’s calculations were more accurate. But these aren’t precise scientific devices and frankly this type of data is best used to look at your progress over time rather than for a snapshot of your performance in an individual session. I do appreciate that Apple automatically tracks and shows me my post-workout heart rate, since that metric is quite telling of my heart health.

One of the most glaring features missing on the original Pixel Watch was automatic workout start and stop prompts. While it would record your activities without you having to first launch them, Google’s debut smartwatch would not alert you if it had detected you had been, say, out brisk walking for a while. It also didn’t nudge you when you had stopped.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

This year, the Pixel Watch 2 brings these reminders to start (and stop) for seven types of activities — walking, running, rowing, outdoor biking and more. It’s a very simple feature, but it brings me so much joy. The activity I track the most is the 20-minute trek to and from my gym, and I don’t always remember to start it when I head out. Having the reminder pop up when I’ve been walking for ten minutes is usually a relief, especially compared to the frustration I feel when I realize at my destination that I’d forgotten to launch the tracker.

New features: Stress and body-response management

Speaking of frustration, the feature I was most keen to check out this year was the body-response measurement system. Now, “body response” is sort of vague wording, but in this case it’s specifically referring to how your body reacts to stress. Using the cEDA sensor, the Pixel Watch 2 will look for physical signs of stress and prompt you to log your mood or take a walk when it detects these. Typically, cEDA sensors are looking for sudden changes in sweat levels, and Google takes that data, alongside your heart rate variability, to determine how stressed you might be.

In the few days I’ve worn the Pixel Watch 2, my stress levels have been fairly high. Like I mentioned before, I’ve encountered numerous moments of emotional intensity, and for the most part it seems like the device noticed about a third of them. For example, it registered that I had a body response at about 8:50 am on the morning of the wedding, which lines up with when the bridesmaids and I had to rush and finish getting dressed for photos. However, it didn't notice my excitement when I got a message with some good news from my best friend about being in a relatively early stage of cancer. When it did detect a reaction, it usually served an alert about 15 to 30 minutes later, so I sometimes had to struggle to remember what caused my response.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

When the Pixel Watch 2 notices one of these moments, it can prompt you to log your feelings or start a walk, as long as you’ve enabled the feature. The problem is, along with the generic “body response” wording, the results are hard to make sense of. First of all, when you’re looking back at your daily report in the Fitbit app, you’ll see in the “Body responses” section under “Stress and mindfulness” a number of minutes. Not the number of instances you were found to have been having a reaction, but a duration for all the emotions you logged that day.

So on Tuesday afternoon, all I see under “Body responses” is “5 minutes” and one mark on a horizontal scale showing 12 am on the left and 11:59 pm on the right. Tapping on that card brings up more details like a stress management score, number of mindful days and a weekly summary. Scrolling down shows me all the body responses logged in the previous days, and here I can see that Monday was particularly stressful, since I had 36 minutes of body responses that I had labeled as “frustrated.”

On days like Friday where I had logged different emotions, the app says I was “stressed then content.” It’s a tiny bit more useful than I had expected, and though I still find number of minutes to be a strange metric, I can see it being a handy reference when I’m comparing stressful days in future.

You can edit your logged moods via the app and add them to detected body responses that you maybe neglected to label in the moment. I encountered a strange quirk on Monday afternoon where, after I labeled what I was feeling on a bunch of body responses that had been registered on Friday, they showed up on the Fitbit Today dashboard on the watch as having been registered on Monday. It’s a bug that shouldn’t exist, especially when you consider that Fitbit’s been offering stress management tools since it launched the Sense smartwatch in 2020.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Google’s approach to tracking your emotional wellbeing is also slightly unsophisticated when compared to the option on watchOS 10. While Apple’s system doesn’t register changes in your body, it does offer more mood options for you to log. On the Pixel Watch 2, you can only choose from one of eight choices, like “Excited,” “Content,” or “Sad.” Meanwhile, you can choose from dozens of labels and varying intensities on an Apple Watch. I’ve found on at least two occasions that none of the eight words offered by Google fit what I was feeling, and went with, say, “worried” when it would have been more accurate to say I was feeling “unsettled.”

These are, however, issues that feel easy enough to fix via a software update in the future, and aren’t so major that they’d prevent me from recommending the watch. I’m encouraged to see more mainstream tech companies consider emotional and mental wellbeing as part of overall health, and giving users a convenient means to log their feelings will help people have more informed conversations with their therapists or healthcare professionals, too.

Performance and in use

Beyond the new sensors, the Pixel Watch 2 also has a new Snapdragon Wear 5100 processor that should be more responsive and power efficient. Swiping through the Wear OS 4 interface was a breeze and most stats displayed quickly. Using the smart home shortcut to turn my lamp off was satisfyingly convenient, and it reacted quite quickly.

I was pleasantly surprised to see my inbox load quickly in the Gmail app, and I have yet to struggle to read text on the screen. It’s mostly been cloudy these days, so I haven’t had an issue seeing what’s on the Pixel Watch 2’s AMOLED panel. It does go up to the same 1,000 nits as its predecessor, though it’s worth noting that the Apple Watch Series 9 can hit 2,000 nits.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

The Google Assistant was slightly slow at noting what I was saying, especially compared to Siri on the Series 9, which processes on-device. I wish Google would make on-device Assistant processing available on its smartwatch soon. When I left my phones at home while going to the gym one day, Siri was still able to launch an outdoor walk workout while the Google Assistant was completely useless. Neither watch was set up with cellular connectivity, and they were both offline. I also had to laugh when I looked at the Fitbit app and saw it had recorded a 7-hour walk during which I apparently traveled just 0.9 miles.

This is what actually happened: I was on a fairly vigorous hike with some rowdy friends, racing each other up some hills, and I didn’t realize the Pixel Watch 2 was running out of juice. Before it died, though, it had recognized that I had been “walking” for a while and suggested I start tracking. I did, and shortly after that the watch conked out. It still had some power left, because tapping the screen aggressively would show the time and a red empty battery icon.

I believe it was probably still tracking the duration of my workout in the background but couldn’t log any other metric (like distance or steps). This is funny, since Google says your stats will be recorded up till the device dies, and then be uploaded and synced with the Fitbit app after it’s recharged and turned back on.

That’s another small gripe I have about the Pixel Watch 2 — for your data to show up in the smartphone app, you’ll have to be connected to the internet. It doesn’t matter if your devices are paired over Bluetooth. You’ll have to be online for the information to sync.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

If you’re a Fitbit Premium subscriber (for $10 a month), you’ll be able to send emergency communications over LTE even if you don’t have a cellular plan for your watch or you’re not within range of your own provider. To be clear, this only works on the LTE model, not the Wi-Fi only version. This is particularly handy for the new Safety Check feature, which Google brought over from the Pixel phones. With it, you can select an activity like walking alone, hiking or going for a run. Then, start a timer for however long you think you’ll be out and confirm your emergency contacts.

When you are one minute away from the countdown ending, the watch will buzz and nudge you to end the timer. If you don’t, your contacts will get a selection of information that you can choose, including your live GPS location and whether you’ve called emergency services. You can also decide to alert them when your battery dies.

All of this is stuff you’ll have to set up in the Fitbit or Watch app on your phone, which brings me to another observation: I never really have to go deep into the Apple Watch’s settings to enable new, helpful features. With the Pixel Watch 2, I had to be sure to enable everything, even the reminders to start and stop workouts, which seemed like things that should be on by default anyway. This is pretty emblematic of the Android vs Apple experience, where the former is typically more involved, but is more customizable. You can add a tile to make your favorite functions easier to find, for example. Apple products, meanwhile, don’t require a lot of work out of the box, but you don’t have as much freedom to organize your apps.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

It’s not really a criticism of the Pixel Watch 2, though I will point out that this year’s model comes with Always On Display enabled by default, whereas the original didn’t. Google was probably taken to task for not making this the primary setting out of the box, and it’s possible the company turns more features on by default in future. AOD activated makes so much more sense, but I understand the impact it has on battery life.

Battery life and charging

With its new processor and slightly larger battery, the Pixel Watch 2 is supposed to last 24 hours with the AOD enabled. I was pleased to see that when I took the watch off at the end of the day, it usually still had about 35 to 40 percent left. That’s enough to track your sleep at night, according to Google.

My concern is if I do opt to wear the watch to bed instead of charging it overnight, it might not juice up fast enough for my morning workouts. The Pixel Watch 2’s overhauled contact charging system is supposed to get you back to 100 percent in 75 minutes, which is a grand total of five minutes shorter than last year’s model.

That’s not a dramatic improvement, but thankfully I was able to get the watch from 29 to 44 percent in about 5 minutes, and that lasted me through two outdoor walks, a circuit training session and several workouts with heart-rate range and pace alerts enabled. By the time I was able to plug the watch back in after all that, I still had 21 percent left.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

In general, the Pixel Watch 2 lasted almost as long as the Apple Watch Series 9 (41mm model), which means it’s closer to being on par with its main competitor. Of course, Samsung watches and other activity trackers tend to last longer, but Google has a higher pulse sampling rate of once every second. Sadly, like its predecessor, the Pixel Watch 2 doesn’t support wireless charging, so you can’t use your Pixel or Samsung handsets to share a bit of juice when you’re on the go.

Wrap-up

I’m conflicted. The Pixel Watch 2 is a definite improvement over its predecessor, and offers several unique features that set it apart from the competition. In particular, the stress management tools are things that rivals like Apple are yet to offer. Fitbit (or Google) continues to offer industry-leading heart rate measurements and insights, thanks to years of experience and expertise. But some software quirks and confusing data presentation get in the way.

With the Pixel Watch 2, Google is reducing the gap between it, Apple and Samsung on things like battery life, while giving itself an edge with its approach to measuring stress as part of wellbeing. It’s still far from being the best smartwatch around, but for Android users at least, it’s becoming more of a solid contender.

After teasing us for weeks with trailers showing off the Pixel 8 series, Google is now ready to give us all the details about its latest flagships. The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro look largely the same as their predecessors, with a couple of key differences. The regular Pixel 8 is slightly smaller, which makes it easier to use with one hand. Meanwhile, the Pro model has a new matte finish, upgraded cameras and an intriguing temperature sensor.

Across the Pixel 8 series, we’re also getting the company’s Tensor G3 processor, Assistant improvements and, notably, seven whole years of Android and security updates. So, you might actually be able to hang on to your Pixel flagship for a lot longer than before. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro do enough for you to want to keep them around for years to come.

It’s worth noting up front that, though it’s smaller than before, the standard Pixel 8 starts at $699, which is $100 more than its predecessor. That seems a little counterintuitive, but the slightly smaller display actually refreshes at up to 120Hz now, which is better than the 90Hz last year. Meanwhile, the Pixel 8 Pro costs the same $899 as the Pixel 7 Pro did, and you can find a slew of pre-order offers from Google and most carriers to sweeten the deal.

A potentially useful temperature sensor

Of all the changes coming to Google’s flagships, I’m most intrigued by the new temperature sensor on the Pixel 8 Pro. I know, I know. It might seem like a gimmick and I hardly ever use a thermometer in my daily life anyway. But in the stale, tired land of smartphones, it’s a novelty and that also tells me Google is at least trying something new.

The temperature sensor sits below the flash on the Pixel 8 Pro’s camera bar (and to be clear the regular Pixel 8 does not have this). To take a reading, you’ll have to launch the new Temperature app and select the type of object you’re trying to measure. You can choose from “food and organic,” “cast iron,” “plastic and rubber,” “fabric” and more.

For now, Google is waiting on FDA approval to enable the Pixel 8 Pro to take body temperature readings. But nothing is really stopping you from selecting the generic “default” option and pointing the infrared sensor at your forehead. Just know that it’s not the advertised application and that the reading might not be 100-percent accurate.

With the existing app and algorithms, though, you can check the temperature of bath water before putting your child in it or make sure your cast iron pan is hot enough before sticking your steak in it. There are plenty of ways to use the sensor, but most of us have survived this long without carrying a thermometer everywhere, I’m not sure we will suddenly start relying on it. And it’s entirely possible this feature goes the way of the Soli radar that Google introduced on the Pixel 4 (and retired on the Pixel 5).

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Still, at least based on my few attempts at using the Pixel 8 Pro to scan things, the system appears to work. I stuck the sensor within an inch or two of iced water and warm coffee, and within 5 centimeters or 2 inches is recommended for best results (A Google rep cautioned against using the sensor on anything that has steam coming out of it). It took barely a second for the measurements to appear on the app, and the results all seemed accurate. The coffee, which had been sitting out for a while, generally registered at around 97.2 degrees Fahrenheit across my multiple readings, while the iced water came in at 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ll have to spend more time with a review unit in the real world to know just how much I’ll use this, and whether it’ll affect battery performance.

The Assistant gets better with generative AI

The temperature sensor might be useful in specific scenarios, but the bulk of the updates for the Pixel 8 series is in the Assistant. With generative AI being all the rage this year, it’s no surprise that Google is integrating those capabilities in its phones. On the Pixel 8s, you’ll be able to ask the Assistant to summarize, read aloud and translate articles and web pages. I opened up my iPhone 15 Pro Max hands-on on Engadget.com, long pressed the power button to bring up the Assistant and told it to “Summarize this page.”

The Assistant said “The author reviews the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which has a new zoom lens and a new Action button.” It goes on to explain, in two subsequent bullet points, that my article had said that the Action button is programmable and that the device “has a titanium body and a FineWoven case that is meant to replace leather.”

My inner editor would tweak some of the language there, but the Assistant generally did a good job summarizing my piece. At the bottom, Google asks for feedback on the summary and suggests some follow-up actions with buttons like “About iPhones,” “Who invented the iPhone” and more. If you’ve spent any time playing with chatbots like Bard or Bing AI, this will all feel very familiar.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

I didn’t actually have to use my voice to ask for a breakdown of my article, by the way. After bringing up the Assistant, the system offers suggested actions like “Summarize,” “Read aloud” “Translate” and “Search screen.” If you want to keep your attention on crossing the road or don’t have time to scan an entire review, the new read aloud tool can be very helpful. I particularly like that when you ask the Assistant to read something out, a box appears with controls for playback speed, skipping ahead or back 10 seconds, as well as a progress bar that you can drag.

At the bottom right of the playback box is a little translate icon — you can not only ask the Assistant to convert articles in foreign languages into one you understand, but it can also read aloud in a supported language, too. I asked for my review to be translated to and read aloud in Mandarin, and the Pixel 8 Pro did so accurately and almost immediately.

One of my favorite features on Pixel phones is Call Screening, which lets you tap the Assistant to figure out who is ringing you and why. With updates coming to the Pixel 8 line, the artificial voice will sound more natural, adding some pauses and nonverbal utterances to seem more human. We saw examples of this when Google first announced Duplex, and while most of us were nervous about the implications of AI that could sound much more human, there are potential advantages here. Most notably, callers are probably less likely to hang up if they think they’re talking to a real person, and you’ll have an easier time asking them questions without picking up the phone.

Photo by Brian Oh / Engadget

The Assistant can also understand if someone is calling about a package, and will suggest more follow-ups like “Leave by front door” and “I’ll be right there.” During a rehearsed demo with Google’s executives, this worked very well. But when I tried later by masquerading as a delivery person looking for a signature, the Assistant failed to bring up a relevant prompt. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company improves this further over time, and frankly its Call Screening is still better than Apple’s Live Voicemail, which was just released in iOS 17. Google’s implementation allows for greater flexibility and interaction, making it more helpful.

Another one of my favorite Pixel-first tools is the Recorder app, and soon it will be able to provide summaries of your transcripts. If you use Recorder for loads of meetings and interviews, this may help you more quickly identify the chat you were looking for. Based on the demo I saw, it doesn’t provide very detailed recaps, instead offering incredibly high-level bullet points. Reporters like myself will probably still need to spend a lot of time picking out noteworthy quotes.

The Assistant is also supposed to get better at understanding your comments even if you trip up or say things like “uhm” or “er” while talking to it. In my brief experience so far, the system did understand me in spite of some pauses and “uhms,” though I’m not sure if I would ever unlearn the habit of talking very precisely to the Assistant.

Cameras

I’ve long held that Pixel phones have the best smartphone cameras, but with companies like Apple and Samsung making great strides in their flagships recently, Google’s lead is shrinking. The company was late to shift to multi-sensor setups, relying heavily on its software prowess to make up for lacking hardware in the past. In recent generations, we’ve seen a more balanced approach, with Google introducing slightly sharper cameras, while continuing to update its algorithms to boost clarity and color.

With the Pixel 8 series, we’re seeing more of this two-pronged strategy. The Pixel 8 Pro is getting a sharper 48-megapixel ultrawide camera while the telephoto system’s 48MP sensor is using a lens with an improved f/2.8 aperture but (slightly) wider field of view than last year. Its primary camera has the same 50MP setup as before, though Google says its f/1.68 lens has “2X optical quality” compared to last year’s f/1.85 glass. Meanwhile, the standard Pixel 8’s main camera is the same as the 8 Pro’s, which is slightly better than the Pixel 7’s. Its one other rear sensor is also pretty much identical to the last generation’s.

The hardware might be a small upgrade, but the more significant change lies in the software. Google has redesigned its camera app to make manual controls easier to reach. With the new layout, there are two buttons at the bottom that let you switch between photo and video capture. That’s a little more organized, given that Pixels offer different modes like Action for adding motion blur to your shots.

This redesign also enabled Google to throw in a Pro mode, giving you manual control over settings labeled as brightness, shadow, white balance, as well as capturing stills at the full resolution of 50 megapixels. You’ll have to go into settings to switch on Manual mode, and doing so will turn off the auto lens switching feature.

Photo by Brian Oh / Engadget

I discovered this because I was using the Pixel 8 Pro to get super up close with a flower at the demo space, so I could check out the improved Macro focus. But because I had activated Manual mode, the lens wasn’t changing on its own when I pushed the device into the petals. With its sharper ultrawide sensor, the Pixel 8 Pro can get even closer to subjects and still keep focus. This year’s Pro model will work up to 2 centimeters away, while the standard Pixel 8 gets macro support for the first time and has the same capability as the Pixel 7 Pro. That means it can get as close as 3cm.

I didn’t break out a ruler to see how far away the cameras were from the flowers I was shooting, but I was impressed by how much detail the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro managed to capture. I’d have to pit Google’s flagships against Apple’s and Samsung’s in the real world to say if it’s better than the competition, but at least from my hands-on, it seemed effective and fast.

I also checked out the Pixel 8 Pro’s 5x telephoto system by zooming into items at a breakfast buffet about 15 feet away, and was able to read words on the cards identifying the types of milk available. Again, I can’t say how well this compares to Samsung’s Space Zoom or the iPhone 15 Pro Max yet.

Some of the biggest improvements to the Pixel 8’s cameras are in video recording and processing. The main new feature is Video Boost, which will upload your clips to the cloud for enhancement using Google’s more-powerful processors. These include applying HDR+, enhanced color grading and, for the first time, Night Sight Video. In a sample Google showed me, a scene of someone seemingly kicking a ball into a net by themselves in the dark looked so much brighter after Video Boost that I was able to see that there was a second person in the shot.

I’m a bit skeptical about this feature, because it requires you to send a file to Google’s servers and it’s not clear how long it will take for the results to come back. The company said it could be a few hours or longer, depending on the length of the video. It’s also coming later this year and won’t be available at launch, so there’s still some time before we can check it out for ourselves.

Photo by Brian Oh / Engadget

I’m more intrigued, however, by what Google is calling “Audio Magic Eraser.” Just as the Magic Eraser for images can remove photobombers in the background, this new tool can reduce background noise in your videos. I was shown a sample video of a street performer playing on an instrument and a siren blaring by, overpowering the music. After Audio Magic Eraser was applied, the sound of the passing vehicle was noticeably reduced. Though it was not completely eliminated, it was definitely less distracting.

There are plenty of other new features coming to the Pixel 8 series, including an improved Best Take that lets you pick your favorite shot of each person in a group photo. Magic Editor, which was introduced at Google I/O this year, will also be available when the new flagships launch. Finally, the Pixel 8 Pro’s 10.5MP selfie camera is getting autofocus, while the regular Pixel 8 also has a 10.5MP selfie sensor but with fixed focus.

Face unlock, displays and other updates

In addition to cameras, Assistant and the temperature sensor, there are some updates across the Pixel 8 series worth mentioning. Face Unlock, for example, has now been deemed to meet the company’s internal security standards, and can therefore be used in more areas like authenticating mobile payments or logging into apps. That’s in part enabled by the Tensor G3 chip in both phones, which also powers things like Audio Magic Eraser, filtering out more spam calls and more. We don’t know very much else about Tensor G3 at the moment, though.

Photo by Brian Oh / Engadget

Google is also introducing a new name for the displays it uses on the Pixels — Actua on the smaller handset and Super Actua on the Pro. Think of it as Retina and Super Retina on Apple devices, but Google. The names don’t really mean anything other than that the company is using its own software and processing to make things look brighter and sharper.

We’re at a point with smartphone displays where most human beings can’t tell the difference between a Super Retina and a Super Actua display, as long as they’re playing the same content at the same brightness. What’s worth noting is that the Pixel 8 now has a 6.2-inch screen and refreshes at 120Hz, while the Pixel 8 Pro maintains the same 6.7-inch size with an ever so slightly wider aspect ratio of 20:9 (compared to last year’s 19.5:9). The Pros also have a matte finish this time, and come in Bay (a pastel blue), Porcelain (white) and Obsidian (black) while the smaller handset is available in Rose (a light peach) in addition to the black and white options.

For things like battery life, performance, how slippery the phone is and how hot it runs, we’ll need to use the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro in the real world before we have a verdict. Stay tuned for our full review to get all those details.

Follow all of the news live from Google’s 2023 Pixel event right here.

When Google debuted the Pixel Watch last year, hopes were high that it would be a real rival for the Apple Watch. But, due to subpar battery life and some friction around integrating Fitbit’s health-tracking features, the company failed to deliver a truly satisfying contender. The hype for the Pixel Watch 2 is significantly less than for its predecessor, and Google needs to convince us it adds enough to justify an upgrade.

From the outside, the Pixel Watch 2 brings a fairly modest set of updates, but it offers some compelling new features that could make it one of the best health and wellness-tracking wearables around. At a starting price of $350, the Pixel Watch 2 sits between the $300 Galaxy Watch 6 and the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic, as well as the Apple Watch Series 9, which both cost $400. It offers a multi-path heart rate monitor and introduces body-response and skin temperature sensors, along with new apps and personal safety features that both help set it apart from and catch up to the competition.

Most of the changes coming to the new Pixel Watch aren’t things I could easily test at a brief hands-on session, like the new body response tracking tools or how much more accurate the multi-path heart rate sensor is. I also couldn’t tell you whether the added Safety Check feature will give me peace of mind when venturing to strange places on my own.

What I was quickly able to confirm was that, on the surface, the new Pixel Watch is just as attractive as before. The domed glass and round face look just as smooth, and Google says it’s made the case a whopping 5 grams lighter, while the glass covering the screen is a bit thinner. The company also says its recycled aluminum housing makes the haptic feedback on the rotating crown feel a bit more noticeable (even though the vibrating motor is the same).

That decrease in weight should make the new Watch more comfortable to wear, especially if you plan to keep it on in bed. I barely noticed it was lighter when I tried one on, but I assume most people would have trouble detecting a mere 5-gram difference.

More importantly, Google said it redesigned the back housing to contain the three new sensors and help maintain contact with your skin. This will also keep the heart rate reader in place during vigorous activities for more consistent measurements. Usually when I hear about this sort of watch case design, I worry about it being uncomfortably snug, but the Pixel Watch 2 I tried on felt pleasant enough. Like I did last year, I love Google’s woven loop band, which is as easy to wear on my wrist as a scrunchie.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Speaking of, the company is also rolling out new accessories, including a lighter perforated sports band and a narrow strap of metallic links. Swapping these out is still fairly easy using Google’s proprietary push-and-click mechanism, which it’s previously described as similar to switching out lenses on a DSLR. There are also new watch faces which are similar to the ones we saw Apple launch on its smartwatches this year, that place information at the farthest edges of the screen, as if they were right on the bezels.

The Pixel Watch 2 is still only available in one size (41mm) and its AMOLED screen has the same 320 ppi pixel density as its predecessor. It even goes up to the same 1,000 nits of brightness, though Google has tweaked the font size and color scheme in things like the workout app to make them easier to read. I haven’t had any trouble seeing my activity stats on the Pixel Watch, and the 41mm size sits nicely on my relatively small wrist. But I imagine there are people who might prefer a larger screen.

Animations also look smoother, according to the company, thanks to the Pixel Watch 2’s quad-core Snapdragon Wear 5100 processor. Not only does it have more cores than the Exynos 9110 in the original watch, the new chip uses a 4nm design compared to the Exynos’ 10nm process. That means it’ll be more power efficient, and together with its slightly larger 306mAh battery (up from 294mAh on the previous model), we should be getting longer runtimes.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

But, because the Pixel Watch 2 comes with its always on display (AOD) enabled by default, battery life is listed as the same 24 hours as last year, when the number was given without the AOD on. I expect if you disable the AOD, you might get a few more hours, but that’s not something I can confirm without testing the device out myself. Google also implemented a new contact charging design on the underside that it says can help you get 12 hours of juice after plugging in for 30 minutes, while getting fully charged should take 75 minutes. Unfortunately, there's no wireless charging, which seems like a real oversight.

Along with the updated contact charging is a slew of sensors. The body response sensor, which is a continuous electrodermal activity (cEDA) monitor, looks for microscopic beads of sweat. Using data from that and the skin temperature sensor, as well as your pulse and heart rate variability, the Pixel Watch 2 will guess when you’re feeling stressed and suggest you log your emotions and try a guided meditation or go on a walk.

This is far from the first time Google (or, more accurately, Fitbit) has offered similar stress management features, since it rolled out an EDA sensor on its Sense smartwatch in 2020. But while the company may have had a few years of experience tracking this metric, it still isn’t an exact science. I didn’t wear the demo unit long enough for it to say I felt stressed (even though you better believe I was), so I couldn’t check out its suggested actions. But I’d be curious to see what sorts of patterns I would glean from wearing this in the real world over time.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

I’m also keen to put the new heart rate sensor to the test at my daily HIIT workouts, but I’m actually most excited about something that should have been on the Pixel Watch from the start: automatic workout start and stop reminders. One of my complaints about last year’s model was the lack of alerts if you’ve been active for a while. In fact, I’ll just quote my review here:

With the Pixel Watch 2, you should be nudged after you’ve been doing one of seven common workouts for a while. They include running, outdoor cycling, spinning, walking and rowing. Importantly, you’ll also be prompted to end a session after you’ve stopped doing one of those things for some time.

For outdoor runners in particular, the new pace coaching feature should be helpful. Meanwhile, those looking to hit and maintain specific heart rate zones will appreciate the ability to set target numbers and get haptic and voice alerts to help stay within range. Though I did get on a treadmill after putting on a Pixel Watch 2, I didn’t work out long enough to trigger the automatic start.

Something else I would prefer to evaluate outside of the demo space was the new Safety Check feature. It joins fall detection and emergency SOS as part of Google’s suite of personal safety tools, and is quite similar to what Apple offers in watchOS and iOS. Specifically, the Pixel Watch 2’s Safety Check reminds me a lot of Check In in iOS 17. The latter has you start a session with a friend or loved one in Messages, and end it when you arrive home with your phone. If you don’t make it to your destination in a set amount of time, your contact will be alerted and sent some info about your location.

Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Google’s approach is very similar — you go to the Personal Safety app on the Pixel Watch 2 and select Safety Check. This lets you start a timer for your preferred amount of time. When that runs out and you don’t tell the watch you’re okay, Google will let your pre-set contacts know something is up and share your last known or live location.

Safety Check feels like something that’s nice to have on occasion, but what might really improve your daily interactions with the Pixel Watch 2 are updated Google apps like Calendar and Gmail. And in yet another change that sounds very similar to something Apple brought this year, the Google Assistant is getting support for health and fitness queries so you can ask for your real-time or historical stats without touching the screen. Unlike Apple, though, the Pixel Watch 2’s assistant requests are not processed on-device, so they’ll require an internet connection.

There are a lot of changes coming to the Pixel Watch, and some feel more meaningful than others. But will they make for a significant update this year? Is Google simply catching up to Apple and Samsung, or is it leading the way by introducing body-response measurements? Those are questions better answered after some time with a review unit. For now, if you're already excited by the new features, you can already pre-order the device or buy it on October 12. The Pixel Watch 2 is available in silver, black and gold cases with a variety of straps and come with six months of Fitbit Premium included. 

Follow all of the news live from Google’s 2023 Pixel event right here.

With Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Amazon already having had their fall announcement events this year, Google's hardware keynote is ostensibly the last major launch of 2023. The company has more or less told us what it's going to be unveiling today, teasing us with trailers of the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2. If the keynotes of the other tech giants told us anything, it's that we should expect Google to also pile on with a ton of updates about its developments in generative AI, in addition to the new phones and smartwatch. We'll also probably learn more about features coming to Android 14, and it's highly likely the Assistant gains some new skills as well. 

The show kicks off on October 4 at 10AM ET, and I'll be bringing you the updates live right here, along with a healthy dose of context and analysis. Make sure to join us then!

Google has announced a new control in its robots.txt indexing file that would let publishers decide whether their content will "help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products." The control is a crawler called Google-Extended, and publishers can add it to the file in their site's documentation to tell Google not to use it for those two APIs. In its announcement, the company's vice president of "Trust" Danielle Romain said it's "heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases."

Romain added that Google-Extended "is an important step in providing transparency and control that we believe all providers of AI models should make available." As generative AI chatbots grow in prevalence and become more deeply integrated into search results, the way content is digested by things like Bard and Bing AI has been of concern to publishers. 

While those systems may cite their sources, they do aggregate information that originates from different websites and present it to the users within the conversation. This might drastically reduce the amount of traffic going to individual outlets, which would then significantly impact things like ad revenue and entire business models.

Romain points out that "as AI applications expand, web publishers will face the increasing complexity of managing different uses at scale." This year has seen an explosion in the development of tools based on generative AI, and with search being such a huge way people discover content, the state of the internet looks set to undergo a huge shift. Google's addition of this control is not only timely, but indicates it's thinking about the way its products will impact the web.

Microsoft continues to build inclusive accessories and features for its mainstream products and the company showed off more at its New York event on Thursday. It unveiled an Adaptive Touch feature that works on the “precision haptic trackpad” of the Surface Laptop Studio 2. During its keynote, the company called this the “most inclusive touchpad on any laptop,” and based on my early impressions, that claim might just be true.

Not a lot is currently known about how the feature will work, but I was able to spend some time with Microsoft’s accessibility program manager Solomon Romney to get a deeper understanding. Romney was born without fingers on his left hand and struggles to use standard touchpads on most laptops. Adaptive Touch allows him to drag his left hand on the glass-covered surface and not have the cursor jump around the screen.

The first thing to point out is that the adaptive touch feature currently requires a haptic trackpad to work, meaning at the moment it’s only available on the Surface Laptop Studio 2. You’ll have to go into the computer’s touchpad settings and enable Adaptive Touch, which throws up an alert that you won’t be able to use multitouch gestures like pinch to zoom.

That’s because the system is looking for multiple points of contact with the trackpad and noticing if they’re moving in the same general direction, to determine where to move the mouse. It’s in part based on the technology that Microsoft uses for palm rejection, but reconfigured for Adaptive Touch.

Microsoft barely mentions this feature in its materials announcing the Surface Laptop Studio 2, and Google searches for terms like “Microsoft inclusive trackpad” or “Surface Laptop Studio 2 accessibility touchpad” yield unrelated results. It’s clear there’s still a lot to understand about how Adaptive Touch works and what its limits are. For now, though, I’m encouraged to see Microsoft continue to design for inclusivity, and I’m excited for what might be to come.

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft’s 2023 Surface event right here.

After spending a chunk of its event today talking about Alexa upgrades, Amazon announced two new accessibility features coming to its devices later this year. First is Eye Gaze on Alexa, which will let those with mobility or speech disabilities use their gaze to perform a set of preset actions on the Fire Max 11 tablet. 

This is the first time Amazon is working on gaze-based navigation of its devices, and it will use the camera on the Max 11 to keep track of where a user is looking. The preset actions include smart home controls, media playback and making calls. Eye Gaze will be available on the Max 11 later this year at no additional cost. The company said during its event that this is "still day one for this technology — we're very excited about its potential." More details on how Eye Gaze actually works are not available yet.

Amazon is also adding a new Call Translation feature that will transcribe Alexa calls on Echo Show devices and display onscreen captions. It can convert them into over 10 languages including English, French, Spanish and Portuguese and will launch later this year on Echo Show devices and the Alexa app for those in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Call captioning is also being expanded to Europe. 

Follow all of the news live from Amazon’s 2023 Devices event right here.