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This new Gemini feature won't be available on Samsung devices
- TalkBack’s new AI-powered image description feature won’t be available on Samsung phones and tablets.
- This feature uses Google’s Gemini AI to generate a description of images.
- Samsung devices don’t offer Google’s solution because Samsung has its own, competing TalkBack service.
To make Android more accessible to people with vision problems, Google created TalkBack, a screen reader service. Earlier today, the company announced an update to TalkBack that leverages its Gemini AI model to generate descriptions of images shown on screen. What Google didn’t mention in its announcement is the fact that this feature won’t be available on all Android devices — namely, those from Samsung.
TalkBack is part of the Android Accessibility Suite app, which is preloaded on most Android devices that bundle Google Mobile Services (GMS). However, it isn’t preloaded on Samsung Galaxy devices that run One UI, Samsung’s fork of Android. The reason why is because Samsung preloads its own suite of accessibility tools, which includes its own custom TalkBack service. Google lets OEMs skip out on preloading the Android Accessibility Suite so long as they include specific accessibility tools (like a screen reader) that meet certain criteria.
The TalkBack service that’s preloaded on Samsung devices running One UI has most of the features available in Google’s version provided through the Android Accessibility Suite app. However, it’s not the same app, and Samsung is responsible for updating it rather than Google. Samsung’s version of TalkBack is updated through the Galaxy Store whereas Google’s version is updated through the Play Store.
Although the Android Accessibility Suite can be installed on Samsung Galaxy devices through the Google Play Store, Samsung’s TalkBack service overrides Google’s one, meaning the latter cannot be used alongside it. This was likely done so users wouldn’t see two versions of TalkBack in Settings, but it unfortunately means that Google’s version of TalkBack — along with its new Gemini AI-powered image description feature — can’t be used on Samsung devices, at least for now.
TalkBack’s new AI-powered image description feature will work on most other Android 11+ devices, though. On the Google Pixel 9 series, TalkBack will leverage Gemini Nano with multimodality model to generate descriptions fully on-device.
It remains to be seen whether Samsung will update its own TalkBack screen reader service to add an AI image description feature. It’s possible the company will, though whether it might leverage Google’s Gemini AI or another AI model is up in the air. Hopefully we’ll find out soon at SDC 2024, where Samsung is expected to unveil its next version of One UI.