Andy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Raise to Talk will let you summon a voice assistant with a flick of your wrist.
- Code related to the feature has been found in the leaked settings app from One UI Watch 8.
- The feature should be a part of Wear OS 6, which could be announced at The Android Show.
Google I/O might not be until May 20, but Google’s kicking things off today with The Android Show, where Google’s announcing everything new that’s coming to our operating system of choice. Wear OS 6 should be announced either at The Android Show or Google I/O proper, but thanks to an APK teardown, we may have found one of the upcoming features.
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.
Earlier this month, One UI 8 Watch leaked, which told us a lot about Samsung and Google’s plans for smartwatches, as One UI 8 Watch will be based on Wear OS 6. Buried within the settings app APK from the leak, we found strings referencing a “Raise to Talk” gesture.
Code
Raise to talk
The assistant you choose will also be used when you press and hold the Home button if you haven't already chosen to show the Power off menu.
Raise your wrist toward your mouth and start talking. The AI assistant you choose will respond.
The AI assistant won't respond if sound is playing on the watch speaker, if the microphone is being used, such as during a call or voice recording, if health data is being recorded, or if the screen doesn't turn on when you raise your wrist. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen mention of Raise to Talk. In April, we found references to it within Google app v16.14.39 beta. However, there wasn’t much there, and we couldn’t determine if this feature would be released for existing Wear OS versions or require an update. Now that we’ve found code for it in the Wear OS 6 settings app, we can be sure it’ll need that version of Wear OS to function.
The code here gives us some ideas about how this will work. The second string tells us that this will work alongside using the power button to summon your assistant, while the fourth string says this feature won’t activate if you’re recording health data, if the screen doesn’t switch on when you raise your wrist, or if the speaker/mic is being used.
What’s most interesting is the third string, which says “the AI assistant you choose will respond.” In the context of Samsung’s watches it could indicate that Raise to Talk will work for Bixby, and not just Google Assistant/Gemini.
Do you use voice assistants on your smartwatch? Would Raise to Talk make you more likely to? Let us know in the comments.
