Google is rolling out a handy accessibility feature that should make life easier in your home  — notifications about household sounds. Once you enable this feature, your phone will recognize sounds like the doorbell, a barking dog, and running water. This fun…

Google is rolling out a handy accessibility feature that should make life easier in your home  notifications about household sounds.
Once you enable this feature, your phone will recognize sounds like the doorbell, a barking dog, and running water. This functionality is powered by Googles Live Transcribe technology, which was originally used only to convert speech to text. But now, it can also identify sounds around you.
While the household sound notifications are targeted towards people with hearing loss, it can also alert you to incidents if youre wearing headphones and listening to music or podcasts.
Apart from displaying these alerts on your Android phone, Google can send them to your Wear OS watch too.
The Big G says this feature works completely offline through on-device machine learning, and currently, it detects 10 types of sounds including baby sounds, running water, smoke and fire alarms, and knocks on a door. This new feature will work on all devices running Android 5.0 or above through the Live Transcribe app.
Googles not the only company to roll out this feature. Apple has a similar sound detection feature in its accessibility suite in iOS 14. However, the search giant also gives you a timeline of events for notifications in the past.
Google household sound notifications timeline
This feature is the part of Googles recent update of accessibility features in which it also unveiled Action Block for speaking common phrases such as Yes, No, and, Please help me. You can go to Action Blocks on your phone, and tap on the phrase you wanted to speak out loud.
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Published October 9, 2020 — 05:41 UTC