Google has announced the next set of new features that are coming to its Pixel smartphones. Since launching last year’s car-crash warning, the company is expanding its personal safety features with a new “safety check” tool designed to make sure you ‘re all right if you’re out alone — for a walk or ride, maybe.
When you trigger the app, you set a time to check-in when you want to. Once the time comes, a security check will take over your entire screen and will ask for your status. You may ignore the prompt and claim that you’re okay, instantly start communicating your location with emergency personnel, or call 911. If there is no response within a minute, the security check will alert your emergency contacts automatically and will include your position on Google Maps. There is no way for it to call 911 automatically-possibly to prevent false positives.
Also with the slight chance for friends to receive unintended emergency messages, this seems like a very effective protection measure. There is no security check equivalent built into iOS, and it is a continuation of Google moving deeper into the field of personal safety following last year’s launch of car-crash detection. And now the initiative is moving to older Pixels: for both of them, the Personal Safety app will soon be available.
The other major new addition is a bedtime mode which is added to the clock app. “Fall asleep to calming sounds and limit interruptions while you sleep — and if you stay up on your phone past bedtime, you’ll get a snapshot of how much time you’re spending awake and on which apps,” Google has informed via its blog post.
In a new additional feature, people who rely on the Recorder app from Google can now use Google Assistant to start recordings or search from existing recordings. Users can also get transcripts of their recordings in Google Docs
