Google is rolling out a handy update for Chrome on Android, as it will now allow you to zoom in on text without affecting the appearance of the webpage. You can use a slider to enlarge text, and then set it for one page or for all the sites you visit.
Previously, when you zoomed in on a page in Chrome’s Android app, it enlarged the entire page, making the site more difficult to navigate. You can try out the updated zoom feature by tapping the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of Chrome and then selecting how far you want to increase the size of the text.
Additionally, Chrome’s Optical Character Recognition tool, which converts an image of text into a machine-readable format, will now automatically recognize scanned PDFs on desktop, letting you highlight, copy, and search for text, as well as use a screen reader with them. Google first started rolling out this feature in beta earlier this year, but now it’s available to all users on desktop.
Google is also expanding Gemini’s integration with TalkBack on Android, a screenreader that uses AI to identify and describe images on your screen. Now, TalkBack will let you ask follow-up questions about an image, such as what color an object is, what material it’s made of, and what else is in the image.
The company is launching Expressive Captions as well, which Google says “provides real-time captions for anything with sound across most apps on your phone — using AI to not only capture what someone says, but how they say it.” That means you’ll see captions that tell you when someone is saying “noooooo” instead of “no.” Google is adding captions for more kinds of sounds as well, like whistling or someone clearing their throat. This feature is rolling out in English in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia on devices running Android 15 and later.
