Google is releasing a handy update for the Chrome browser on Android that now allows you to zoom in on text without affecting the appearance of the web page. You can use the slider to zoom in on text, and then customize it for a single page or for all the sites you visit.
Previously, when you zoomed in on a page in the Chrome app for Android, it would zoom in on the entire page, making it difficult to navigate the site. You can try the updated zoom feature by clicking the three-dot menu in the top right corner of Chrome and then selecting how much you want to increase the text size.
In addition, Chrome’s Optical Character Recognition tool, which converts text images into a machine-readable format, now automatically recognizes scanned PDFs on the desktop, allowing you to select, copy, and search text, as well as use a screen reader with them. Google first began rolling out this feature in beta earlier this year, but it is now available to all users on desktop computers.
Google is also expanding Gemini’s integration with TalkBack on Android, a screen reader that uses artificial intelligence to identify and describe images on the screen. TalkBack will now allow you to ask additional questions about an image, such as what color the object is, what material it’s made of, and what else is in the image.
The company is also launching Expressive Captions, which, according to Google, “provides real-time captions for anything with sound in most apps on your phone, using artificial intelligence to not only understand what someone is saying, but how they’re saying it.” That means you’ll see captions that tell you when someone says “no” instead of “no.” Google is also adding captions to other sounds, such as whistles and throat clearing. This feature is available in English in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia on devices running Android 15 and later.
