Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
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TL;DR
- Pixel Buds earbuds already support a number of tap and swipe gesture controls.
- Those include options for answering, rejecting, and ending voice calls.
- That call support could soon expand to also let you tap to mute and unmute.
When we’re shopping for new earbuds, we may talk a lot about sound quality, battery life, or noise cancelation, but there’s another factor which really impacts earbud satisfaction that all too often goes overlooked: the quality of the on-bud controls. We don’t always want to be pulling our phone out to make every adjustment, so a pair of earbuds that lets us easily tap and swipe to control playback and adjust settings is a big deal. Today we’re checking out what could be the next way Google upgrades the touch controls on its Pixel Buds.
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Current Pixel Buds touch controls don’t just let you listen to music without constantly touching your phone — they also work for voice calls, letting you tap once to answer an incoming call, and double-tap to end or reject a call. But now as we look into the changes present in version 1.0.981607934 of the Pixel Buds app, we’re finding Google’s work towards expanding those in a new direction: the ability to mute and unmute calls.
Take a look at some of the new text strings we spotted:
Code
<string name="call_mute_title">Mute & unmute</string>
<string name="call_mute_toggle_description">During a call, single tap either earbud to mute or unmute</string>
<string name="call_mute_toggle_footer">"This feature is limited to Pixel devices when using the Phone and Google Meet apps
On some platforms, the microphone may remain unmuted if the host app does not support the mute command, even if the audio transfer successfully occurs"</string>
<string name="call_mute_toggle_preference_key">call_mute_toggle</string>
<string name="call_mute_toggle_title">Tap to mute & unmute</string>
<string name="mini_oobe_call_mute_done">Done</string>
<string name="mini_oobe_call_mute_next">Next</string>
<string name="mini_oobe_call_mute_pair_info">"This feature is limited to Pixel devices when using the Phone and Google Meet apps
<string name="mini_oobe_call_mute_subtitle">During a call, single tap either earbud to mute or unmute</string>
<string name="mini_oobe_call_mute_switch_title">Tap to mute & unmute</string>
<string name="mini_oobe_call_mute_title">Mute & unmute</string>As you can see, the feature would require the use of a Pixel series phone alongside the Pixel Buds, and would support both voice calls with the Phone app, as well as Google Meet.
Once your call is active, tapping either earbud once will mute or unmute the conversation.
In addition to those text strings, we’ve also uncovered an animation in the app, illustrating this upcoming functionality:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Honestly, this is such a no-brainer of a feature, it’s almost surprising we haven’t had it all this time — we already tap to pause and unpause, so why not support the same sort of thing during calls?
It’s unclear if there might be any sort of exclusivity to specific Pixel Buds models, but hopefully whenever this does finally go live, we see it arrive across the whole lineup.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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