Voice controls have been growing exponentially on smartphones over the past few years with the introduction of Google Now, Siri, and most recently, Cortana. But the voice control system that reigns supreme is Google Now, it initially allowed users to tap on a mic button located in the search bar and ask any question their heart desired, Google would then show them search results along with a voice reply to their question. Since then Google Now has gone nowhere but up, getting better and better as the years went by, now it looks like Google is adding a pretty notable new feature to the service.
That notable new feature is something called ‘Hands Free’ and what it is exactly, we can’t really be sure. The reason we can’t really be sure is because the feature has not been made official by Google just yet, it is something that a handful of users have got to pop up in the Google Settings by changing their primary language. Unfortunately it does nothing more than make an option for Hands Free pop up in the settings and then later disappear when you re-open them, but it does do something important which is let us know it’s being worked on and is coming sometime in the near future. And while there is no way to really know what this new feature will entail, we can make a pretty educated guess.
If you take a look at Motorola’s Touchless Control feature on their Moto X smartphones you will get a pretty good idea of what Google’s Hands Free will bring. This would mean being able to wake your device with the “OK Google command as well as having your notifications read aloud to you on command. There may be more to Google’s Hands Free feature but at the moment we really have no idea what that may be, but we do hope Google has something included that will differentiate it from similar features by different companies such as Motorola.
This new Hands Free feature will not require your device to be capable of digital signal processing so it should be available for just about all devices running Android Lollipop in the future. At first though, we see this feature only being available on Nexus devices running Lollipop just like Google’s ‘Always On Voice Recognition’. When we will see Hands Free hit any device is completely unknown but the fact that we are seeing hints of it pop up here and there tells us we probably won’t have to wait long for it. We will probably see it sometime before the end of the year.
