In addition to adding shortcuts for third-party Android apps to Assistant, Google today announced a new Sound Notifications feature for Android.
Sound Notifications enables your phone to alert you to sounds around you that may be important, like a smoke alarm, running water, dog barking, door knocking, appliances beeping, or a crying baby. If your Android phone senses one of these sounds, it can send you a push notification about it, flash your camera light, or trigger vibrations on your phone.
The feature also works with Wear OS smartwatches. You can choose to get sound notifications via text notifications with vibrations on your wrist, enabling you to get alerts about these important sounds even if you're asleep.
Also included is a Timeline view that makes it easy to see all of the sound notifications that you've gotten recently. You can scroll through the timeline to see the detected sounds from the past few hours as well as how long the sound occurred to give you a better idea of events that might've led up to a notification you got.
Sound Notifications uses machine learning and your phone's microphone to recognize 10 different noises. It works completely offline, so you don't have to worry about not getting alerts for sounds around you if you've got no cellular or Wi-Fi service.
It's pretty neat to have a feature that can identify important sounds around you and send you a notification about them, and it could be useful for a lot of people. Not only will it help people with hearing loss be more aware of important things happening around them, but it could also be handy for people wearing earplugs or headphones.
Sound Notifications is part of the Live Transcribe app. Once you've got it installed, you can launch your phone's Settings app and then find the Accessibility menu and turn on Sound Notifications.
