Google is currently rolling out its June update which includes new features for its Pixel smartphones, including one regarding the “Overview” widget which now displays air quality alerts.
Google knows how to do it with the little smart features that prove invaluable on a daily basis. The widget “Insight“of the Google Pixel has just gained a new one with the update”Pixel Feature Drop» of June which concerns the quality of the ambient air.
Monitoring of the air quality index reserved for three countries
The latest addition of this widget is currently rolling out in the US, Australia and India and will now display the ambient air quality index as a number paired with a colored dot if the air quality the air becomes too bad for some sensitive groups.
This index could also be consulted from the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max, but also on Google Maps and is now coming to Pixel smartphones. The reading will appear below the date, to the right of the weather icon and should display on both the on and off screens.
An alert for sensitive people
As this feature acts as a kind of alert, the index will remain on the widget until the air quality returns to a more moderate zone. There’s no option to turn it off, so it could be that this metric is associated with data from the Weather app that the widget is already using.
If we press on it, the smartphone will open a search page on the quality of the ambient air and will show us other values in the vicinity. In the United States, Google uses data from airnow.gov and PurpleAir to provide its measurements.
It would be interesting to be able to have them permanently on the widget to have access to this information at any time, but for the moment this is not the case yet. Nothing has yet been announced for France regarding this feature. However, it is hard to imagine Google limiting itself to these three countries alone and it will probably be necessary, for the sake of form, to obtain data from the various air quality measurement players.
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