The Top New Features in Google’s Android 17—and Gemini Intelligence—Coming This Summer
The Top New Features in Google’s Android 17—and Gemini Intelligence—Coming This Summer
https://www.wired.com/story/android-17-gemini-top-new-features/
Publish Date: 2026-05-12 03:00:00
Source Domain: www.wired.com
“Our goal is to be able to have it as customizable as possible, pulling from all sorts of data sources that you ask it to be able to create a custom widget for you,” Brooks says. Maybe that means creating a weather widget that shows Celsius and Fahrenheit for when you’re traveling abroad. Or a countdown to your next marathon. Or a widget that shows three new high-protein meal prep recipes every week.
What does this mean for the future of the home screen? Will we still have app grids? Or will every person’s phone have its own look and feel, drummed up by natural language? Brooks says Android has always been good at customization, so we should expect even more control over how our phones look and work. “I think you’ll see a lot more of that in the future on how we can continue to do this in a delightful way, to make your device truly yours.”
Rambler
Courtesy of Google
The voice dictation feature on Google’s Gboard keyboard is getting a Gemini upgrade. A new feature called Rambler smartens voice-to-text; Gemini will understand when you say “um,” “ah,” and “like,” and will remove those verbal fillers from your dictated text. If someone interrupts you while you’re dictating and you respond, Gemini will cut that part from your transcription so you don’t have to delete a bunch of words and start over.
The whole point is that you’re able to speak naturally, and the final result will be a trimmed version of what you want to say, minus the filler words we use in natural speech. That does mean Gemini does a little editing to massage the sentences by guessing at what it thinks you want to say. It works in multiple languages and is also multilingual, so if you frequently blend English and Spanish, it will switch between both in a single message. Google says audio is not stored or saved.
Screen Reactions
Courtesy of Google
Moving on from AI-focused improvements, Android 17 will debut an easy way to create a reaction video. You know those videos on social with the…
