Google improves your digital life with new features: Faster translation on Pixel and upgraded Fi Web Messaging

Google has recently launched a couple of important updates across its services, making things easier for Pixel phone owners and those who use the Google Fi Wireless service. These changes focus on improving how we read foreign languages and how we handle phone calls and messages across different devices.

One of the biggest improvements is how the Circle to Search feature now handles translation. If you’re not familiar, Circle to Search lets you quickly look up anything on your screen just by drawing a circle or scribbling on it. Before this update, if you were trying to read a long news story or a lengthy social media thread in a different language, you would have to use Circle to Search, get the translation for the part of the screen you were looking at, close the tool, scroll down, and then open it again for the next section. This was tedious and time-consuming.

The new capability, which Google calls “Scroll and translate,” fixes this problem completely. Now, once you start the translation mode within Circle to Search, it stays active even as you move down the page. This means you can just keep scrolling, and the foreign text will continuously change to your preferred language automatically.

It’s a huge step forward for anyone who regularly reads menus, social media posts, or articles from around the world. While this feature was first exclusive to Samsung phones, it is now reaching Pixel devices and others, making it a standard and much more useful tool for many users. You’ll know it’s working because you’ll see a light glow around the screen and a small button at the bottom you can tap to turn it off when you’re done translating.

In a separate move, Google has also rolled out significant changes to how Google Fi Wireless customers handle calls and messages on their laptops or tablets. Previously, all web communications—texts, calls, and voicemail—were grouped, which limited the service’s abilities.

The most notable limitation was the lack of support for RCS (Rich Communication Services), which is the modern standard for text messaging, offering high-quality photo sharing, read receipts, and better group chats.

Google has fixed this by splitting the functionality onto two different websites. Texting is now fully handled by Google Messages for web, which finally allows Fi users to take advantage of those richer RCS features.

Meanwhile, a new, separate website called fi.google.com/webcalls has been created to handle phone calls and check your voicemail. This separation allows the messaging side to fully embrace modern RCS texting.

The most convenient part of this update is that you can still make and receive phone calls and manage your voicemail on your computer, even if your actual phone is turned off.

This functionality is only available for Android users right now, but it brings a new level of convenience and features to the Google Fi service, modernizing the way its users communicate across all their devices. To start using these improved services, Fi customers will just need to update their settings within the Google Messages app to stop syncing with the old Fi system.