- An APK teardown revealed that Gemini is testing the ability to make calls and texts even when your phone is locked.
- Currently, Gemini prompts you to unlock your phone before proceeding to carry out such requests.
- Additionally, the Gemini floating overlay will soon get a more minimal look.
Earlier this year, when Gemini replaced Google Assistant on most phones, it wasn’t as intuitive and missed out on a lot of integrations. Gemini still isn’t quite there and doesn’t let you make calls or drop texts without having to unlock your phone, which is quite a limitation. Well, from the looks of it, that will change soon. Soon, Gemini won’t require you to unlock your phone for those actions anymore.
Folks over at Android Authority carried out a teardown of the Google app’s 15.42.30.28.arm64 beta version, which revealed this piece of information. Most importantly, there will be a new on/off toggle. This will give users control over whether they want the functionality or not in the first place.
Even with the feature toggled on, Android Authority notes that Google displays the message, “Gemini will still ask you to unlock when a response contains personal content, such as your Gmail messages, from apps you use”.
Gemini anyway doesn’t handle calls or texts and simply triggers the Assistant to take over and do those for you. This finding states that Gemini will be able to do so even with your phone locked, which is quite convenient. If I’m already unlocking my phone to ask Gemini to call or text someone, I’d rather do those manually anyway. So, this is a much-welcome change.
For example, let’s say that you’re cooking, and your hands are full. In that case, you can simply summon Gemini from the lock screen to call or text someone. Super useful, if you ask me. However, that’s not the only change spotted.
The floating Gemini overlay will most likely go through a design change which makes it more minimalistic. Currently, we see the entire expanded window right away. Going by what the report states, the overlay is now narrower and will expand as you type away your prompt.
With Gemini getting support for more and more integrations, it will be quite interesting to see how helpful summoning the AI without unlocking the phone can further be. What do you think about this? Drop your thoughts in the comments down below!
