Driving mode is about to change: away with the buttons, now everything is done with the voice

It’s a time of great change for Driving mode (actually it’s called Auto Mode, now) of the Google Assistant, which after risking the cancellation it seems to be taking on a new form (it’s easy to get confused between Android Auto, Driving Mode and Android Automotive: find out what they are).

In fact, Google is releasing a update (probably server side) with the new tool, which has been modified to do everything with i voice commands.

Consequently, the most important change concerns the launcher, therefore the icon at the bottom right (the one with the four squares) has been removed and replaced with the icon shaped like gear (settings).

This means you won’t be able to launch apps like Waze, YouTube Music, Google Podcasts and others from the enlarged interface designed to reduce distractions, but you will have access to the mode settings, from which you can control the following options: Turn on Do Not Disturb, Allow incoming calls while driving, Allow messages and voice replies, Message Alert: Notification only / Hear the contact name / Hear the entire message.

As before, there is the button Other settings and that Turn off driving modewhile a message appears at the bottom explaining that for “call, send messages or play media while browsing you need to tap the microphone to use Assistant“.

The driving mode, like the rest of Google Assistantit is now mainly a vocal experiencebut you can still access media controls.

If you are listening to a song, they will be indicated below the app, The first name of the piece, the author, ei buttons play/pause and next track. Self scroll towards the bottom of this section, the multimedia app will be shown in the bottom centre, and by touching it you will still have the controls available.

If you instead touch the playback tab, the media player it will open full screen and Google Maps will switch to picture-in-picture mode.

We currently don’t know how widespread this is update: we haven’t seen it on ours yet devices, but it has appeared on some phones in the United States.