Quietly Rolled Out, Now Official: Google Assistant’s Quick Phrases on Pixel Buds Pro
Google has extended the convenience of its Google Assistant Quick Phrases feature to Pixel Buds Pro, following its initial availability on other Pixel devices such as smartphones, tablets, and Nest devices. Despite being launched over a year ago, the Pixel Buds Pro already boasted smart functionalities through various built-in Google features, including Translate and more. The addition of Quick Phrases, another Google Assistant feature, further enhances the user experience by streamlining voice commands. With Quick Phrases, users no longer need to precede their voice commands with “Hey Google,” simplifying the interaction with the device.
What are Quick Phrases?
Quick Phrases serve as a more straightforward method for executing voice commands, allowing users to directly state the command without the necessity of using the wake-up phrase or hotword, such as “Hey Google,” beforehand. While this feature has been available on Google’s Pixel devices since the Pixel 6 series, its official introduction to the Pixel Buds Pro enhances the accessibility and functionality of these smart earbuds.
While the feature sounds exciting, it is mainly used to complete a task rather than starting it. On Pixel devices, users can simply say “accept” or “decline” to deal with an incoming call. Alarms can be snoozed as well by just saying the word “snooze”. A timer can be stopped by simply saying the word “stop”.
What’s new?
This may sound very convenient and to an extent, they truly are, but it’s still very limited in terms of functionality versus the regular “Hey Google” voice commands which have fewer limitations and are far more in number and versatility. For now, Pixel devices only support a handful of commands which include, answering, declining, and silencing calls, and the ability to snooze and stop alarms and timers. The new Pixel Buds Pro update lets you use the first three quick phrases to control calls without summoning the Google Assistant first.
How do I enable it?
Enabling Quick Phrases on your Pixel Buds Pro is quite easy. Open the Settings app and type out “Quick Phrases”. Once in the section, simply toggle ON the settings to turn on each quick phrase scenario. You can also check out which devices support which quick phrase scenario in the same section.
There are a couple of downsides to activating it. There’s a good chance that an unknown incoming call may be accepted by the phone if you happen to be conversing with someone and happen to use any of the quick phrases in a sentence. There’s also a chance that someone else’s voice (standing near you) may trigger the same. And lastly, if the Google assistant detects a word that sounds very similar to any of the above three quick phrases, then it’ll be triggered. Also users will need to select only one language in Google Assistant Settings and supported languages only include English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish for now.