Prakhar Khanna / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Gemini Live currently offers back-and-forth conversations while continually listening for your input.
- Instead of that, the app is now working on an optional push-to-talk mode.
- Users would have to hold down a microphone button when they wanted Gemini Live to take their voice input.
Mobile phone users of a certain age may remember fondly (or not so fondly) the days of the push-to-talk (PTT) Sprint Nextel iDEN network. Instead of the sort of full-duplex, everybody-talking-at-once experience we’re used to, these phones were able to work more like walkie talkies: You’d press and hold a button as you spoke, and release when you were done. If you’re still carrying a torch for that kind of half-duplex nostalgia, we’ve got an upcoming Gemini Live feature to tell you about that sounds right up your alley.
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The whole point of Gemini Live is engaging in a responsive back-and-forth conversation with Google’s AI agent. More than just delivering one-off answers, this is designed to really let you dig in on a topic. But it’s also a little tricky to manage that sort of ongoing voice input, and we’ve already seen Google come up with some clever ways to do that, with notifications and a call-like UI.
Digging through version 17.38.5.sa.arm64 of the Google app for Android, we’re spotting developer efforts towards giving Gemini Live a different voice input mode. Instead of continually listening, Live would instead offer a PTT interface, only listening for as long as you held down the microphone button.
When active, users will see a slightly different Gemini Live UI than the one we have right now, dropping its mute button in favor of a central PTT button. The popup you see on the left will help inform users of the feature’s operation, and you’ll be able to disable PTT and return to Live’s traditional voice interface by hitting the overflow button in the upper-right. Tapping the video icon would present you with a choice between camera and screen sharing.
We can already imagine a few ways this mode could be really useful, like when you want to take advantage of Gemini Live but you’re in a particularly crowded environment, and don’t want it accidentally responding to other people’s conversations.
It might be even cooler if there were a way for Gemini Live to tap into one of your phone’s hardware buttons for a truly proper PTT experience, but so far we haven’t seen any evidence in that direction. That said, who knows what Google will come up with before this finally goes live?
⚠️ 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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