Monday, August 16, 2021

Did you know you can control Android 12 phones with your face?

Google had unveiled Android 12 for the first time in February 2021, and it has already released various beta builds for Pixel smartphones. This new version of Android brings a lot of new features and optimizations. It also brings a new feature that lets users control their smartphones using facial expressions.

According to a report from XDA Developers, a new update (v12.0.0) to Android Accessibility Suite on Android 12 brings the Camera Switches feature. This new feature allows users to control smartphones using just facial expressions, which would be a boon to some people with disabilities as they don’t need to rely on using the touchscreen to control their phones.

Users can navigate the UI of their phones or tablets running Android 12 through various facial expressions: Look Left, Look Right, Look Up, Open Mouth, Raise Eyebrows, and Smile. Using these expressions, users can do the following actions:

Back
Home
Next
Notifications
Overview
Pause Camera Switch
Previous
Quick Settings
Reverse Auto-Scan
Scroll Backward
Scroll Forward
Select
Toggle Auto-Scan (disabled)
Touch & Hold

When this feature is turned on, a persistent notification icon is shown on the device’s display to let you know that your camera is being used. You can even set the gesture size so that you can choose how big you want to make the gesture before the phone recognizes it as an action. More gestures could be added to Camera Switches in the future.

The feature might also come to phones and tablets running older versions of Android since the folks over at XDA Developers were able to install Android Accessibility Suite on phones running Android 11. However, the feature hasn’t been rolled out to such phones officially yet.

Samsung has already announced the Android 12-based One UI 4 beta update program for the Galaxy S21 series, and it could be released sometime in the next two months. We can expect the South Korean firm to start releasing the stable Android 12-based One UI 4 updates to its flagship devices by the end of this year.