Android’s New Tools Let You Remix Emojis & Teach Kids How To Read

Google is making its Android smartphone systems more intuitive with many new features, including emoji remixing and tools that can teach young children how to read.
 

First up is the ‘Emoji Kitchen’, a tool that remixes all your favorite emojis to create new ones. A demo from Google showed how a basketball and a sparkling heart could be combined to conjure up a heart-shaped basketball with glittery effects.

Of course, that’s a rather niche example for rare situations, unless you regularly invite someone to come over and watch basketball together (with shiny affection no less). But hey, when the occasion calls for it, at least there’s a way to cook up an instant expression to help say it all, right?

This feature, however, only works with select compatible images that users can find on a new tab on the Gboard.

Next, for those who have young kids who are just starting to learn to read, a new tool will aid them in practice by studying from books marked with a “Practice” badge on the Google Play Books.

The tool will ask kids—and people of all ages learning English for the first time—to speak sentences aloud with the mic on. Then, as they do so, there will be buttons below each word that allows them to see the definition or to have it pronounced out to them so they know how it’s supposed to sound.

Other updates include widgets for Google TV, Google Finance, and Google News. In addition, those with devices running on WearOS 2 will now have a Spotify tile and different watch face combinations. While those with WearOS 3 can add single to-do lists from Google Notes.
 
 
 

[via Engadget and Android Police, images via Google]