Kellen
The Pixel Watch 4 is seeing its own little Feature Drop this morning with a handful of new features. Google is adding a couple of new gestures to the watch, as well as smarter smart replies in apps like Google Messages. And if you own a Pixel Watch 3, you’ll also get the new replies, thanks to the on-device Gemma-based language model.
The new Pixel Watch 4 gestures will allow you to double pinch fingers twice or turn your wrist to make things happen. For Double Pinch, Google says you can pinch together to answer or end calls, pause timers, pause music, etc. Should you not remember to pinch, on-screen hints should show up from time-to-time to remind you that a pinch might be easier than physically touching your watch screen.
To clarify, to start, the double pinch will scroll through alerts, instantly send the first Smart Reply available, allow you to manage your timer and stopwatch, snooze an alarm, play/pause music, or snap a photo. The call answering/ending isn’t available just yet.
And for Wrist Turn, this gesture will mostly be to dismiss incoming calls, but I’d imagine it could also scroll through something like notifications. We’ll have to get it activated on the wrist to report back. Note: Google says it only silences incoming calls and closes alerting notifications at this stage.
When it comes to these Smarter Smart Replies, Pixel Watch 3 and Pixel Watch 4 owners will get this feature. These watches will take advantage of a new on-watch language model that is supposedly twice as fast and less power hungry to generate Smart Replies that are…smarter. It should work even when you aren’t connected to your phone too.
We have a couple of examples of smarter replies below. You can see someone in Google Messages ask for another person if they can pick up lemons. The new AI smart replies offer options like “How many lemons do you need?” and “Regular ones or Meyer lemons?” See, they are smarter and context-aware. You get the idea
We’ll let you know as these new features rollout.
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