Earlier this year at Google I/O 2019, Google announced a feature called Live Caption coming to Android 10, and this feature has finally been released in the new Pixel 4 and Pixel 4XL. Another Pixel 4 feature was the ability to take long exposure night sky shots or astrophotography, as a part of their enhanced Night Sight mode. Google has now announced that these two features will be coming to Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a series later this year.
Live Caption in Pixel 4 is a feature that was announced with the launch of Android 10. The feature is an automatic captioning system, similar to the captioning system in YouTube, except that all the processing happens in real time and completely on-device, so it works even if you don’t have cellular data or Wi-Fi, and the captions always stay private and never leave your phone.
This feature will come to older Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL later this year and Google is working with other manufactures to bring this feature to more phones soon. The feature is designed to help users enjoy content if they do not have their headphones and can’t play the audio out loud—or if you’re one of the 466 million people in the world who are Deaf or hard of hearing, for whom the content may be entirely inaccessible.
Along with the launch of Live Caption for the Pixel 4, Google announced an update to its Night Sight technology. Night Sight was an incredible feature that used the power of Googles computational photography to take photos in extremely low light conditions. The feature was first introduced with the Pixel 3 and has been implemented by other manufacturers under different names.
Google has now improved on this feature to give the Pixel 4 the ability to take shots of the night sky, the stars, and even the Milky Way (when you find a clear night) with up to four minutes of 15 long exposure shots, each taking 16 seconds. Google has now confirmed that this feature will come to Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a. Obviously the results will not be the same as the Pixel 4, with the Pixel 4 have much new hardware capabilities. However, it is exciting to see this feature coming to older devices at all.