Android is rolling out its Slices feature and if you got Google Pixel, you may get a taste of very soon. Non-pixel users may have to wait, which is nothing surprising, to be honest. In its working history, slices came up with some third party apps like Doist and Kayak last November, but now it’s ready to take charge of phones with drum rolls.
It is equipped now to do more; making the search bar in the Google app do more than addressing the web queries. You can now adjust the brightness level of the device, change media volume, even use the toggle button to enable and disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, alarm volume, media volume, Auto-rotate, just to name a few.
Let’s take an example for more clarity. With Android Slices in action, if you open the Google app and look for Bluetooth, then beside the various search results, the app will also offer you an inline toggle to quickly enable or disable the Bluetooth setting.
The Google app will display the Setting’s icon on the left and toggle on the right — hit the toggle button to change the enable or disable the setting, without needing to open the Settings app. Quite cool, right?
Earlier, without the Slices feature, a search would bring up the settings icon, but it didn’t allow you to change the setting from right there. You would need to open the app from there and that would be it. But thanks to Slices, you can change the Setting from within the Google app.
See the two searches below for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, one each under the old UI (without Slices feature, left) and new UI (with Slices feature, right).
As of now, the Slices feature is an exclusive feast for Pixel users. How much the users of Samsung Galaxy, OnePlus, LG, Xiaomi, Huawei, Hono, etc. would have to wait is not clear.
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