Google may get much more chatty when you do a search from your Pixel home screen

Google gives us a ton of different ways to look up information, and the form in which it delivers those results can vary a lot based on how we choose to interact with it — type a text search in your browser, and you get your results back as text. Use voice input for Gemini, and you get a voice response. But sometimes that doesn’t always work the way we’d expect, and today we’re checking out what could be some upcoming changes to how Google communicates with us in response to using its Pixel home screen widget.

That search bar widget is a powerful tool, and its convenient placement means that many of us make frequent use of it. Tapping its microphone icon is a quick way to get a search started, but with version 16.50.55.ve.arm64 beta of the Google app, we’ve identified some work-in-progress changes to how it responds.

Right now, when you fire off a voice search through the home screen widget like that, you’ll see Google’s output as a screen of text. Or maybe you’re using the widget’s ability to recognize songs; you don’t even need to actually hit that “search a song” button — Google’s clever enough to know what music sounds like and will deliver results based on the song it identifies. But once again, this is just text that you get.

With this release, however, we’re able to trigger a new behavior from the widget that responds to those same inputs with a voice-based response. You’ll still see the same on-screen content as before, but now with what appears to be AI Mode also giving you a voice reply.

Notice in our second demo that while we get an AI Overview in our results, Google’s voice output isn’t simply reading that aloud, and represents slightly different analysis.

The other big new component of this widget experience is that we’re now seeing a floating overlay at the screen bottom with buttons to dismiss, or continue with further voice input. If you tap through on the mic here, Google will take you to full-blown AI Mode — but stops speaking its responses aloud at the same time.

Right now, this all feels pretty unpolished — especially the presence of that overlay — so we might not bet on it being a change Google intends to push live in the immediate future. But Google sure seems to be working on some kind of overhaul to this experience, so we’ll keep checking out future updates in the hopes we can continue to better characterize what you should expect.