Voice Access helps anyone who has difficulty manipulating a touch screen (e.g. due to paralysis, tremor, or temporary injury) use their Android device by voice.
Voice Access provides many voice commands for:
– Basic navigation (e.g. “go back”, “go home”, “open Gmail”)
– Controlling the current screen (e.g. “tap next”, “scroll down”)
– Text editing and dictation (e.g. “type hello”, “replace coffee with tea”)
You can also say “Help” any time to see a short list of commands.
Voice Access includes a tutorial which introduces the most common voice commands (starting Voice Access, tapping, scrolling, basic text editing, and getting help).
You can use the Google Assistant to start Voice Access by saying “Hey Google, Voice Access”. To do this, you’ll need to enable “Hey Google” detection. You can also tap either the Voice Access notification or a blue Voice Access button and start talking.
To pause Voice Access temporarily, just say “stop listening”. To disable Voice Access completely, go to Settings > Accessibility > Voice Access and turn off the switch.
For additional support, see Voice Access help.
This app uses the AccessibilityService API to help users with motor impairments. It uses the API to collect information about the controls on the screen and activate them based on the user’s spoken instructions.
The app repeats actions twice often which is kind of annoying and it’s impossible to predict when it will do this. The action I have a hard time with is “swipe left/right”. Using numbers to make selections will also trigger a second random action which makes me think this is a deeper issue. I recommend further testing to the team at Google. I’m not in need for this app but as a UX student I can understand how it could frustrate users. Would love to see this product improve.
Very helpful but there are times when if I had use of my hands I would throw the phone against the wall. Text editing can be very frustrating. More often links are not numbered and I have to go from numbers to grid to numbers to grid. Very slow very slow aggravating. There it goes repeating words. Sometimes it’s simply stops working and not having use of my hands I’m stuck unless I can get someone else to close the app or restart my phone. Don’t launch a video with sound. It stops responding.
The Google Assistant is very helpful on my Google pixel 6 pro. It doesn’t always understand everything but it is very helpful for messaging or making calls or bringing up maps. I wish that it understood how to press shuffle in YouTube music; though it is nice to be able to ask the assistant to play a playlist from YouTube music, but I wish that it could shuffle a playlist.
I was really disappointed with this. You can not use it while watching videos or anything that has sound. It only hears what’s happening on the video and does not respond to any commands as a result. I tried every setting, option, voice training and nothing stops Access from only hearing sound played from the video. This it only works on things that require no sound.