Pixel Buds Firmware 550 Includes Find My Device, Bass Boost, and More

Along with new colors, Google is detailing the firmware version 550 update for Pixel Buds, set to roll out this week to all units.

Inside, there’s a healthy amount of changes, but since Google describes it all below, allow me to just give you a few highlights. For one, there’s a bass boost setting. Yessssh. Google is also bringing its Find My Device feature to the Buds, allowing you to ring them from your phone, as well as view their last confirmed location should you misplace them.

Here’s the whole list of what’s news.

What’s New

• Bass boost: toggle bass boost on in Pixel Buds settings to get more bass out of your Pixel Buds.
• Sharing detection: turn on sharing detection in Pixel Buds settings and your Pixel Buds will automatically detect when you share one of your earbuds with another person and allow you to individually swipe to control your own volume.
• Find My Device: in addition to being able to ring your Pixel Buds if they’re connected to your Android phone, you can now see their last known location on a map when they’re no longer connected. There is no active GPS tracking, but this can help you know where to get started if you’ve misplaced them.
• Translate transcribe mode: adding to the already available conversation mode which helps when you’re talking back and forth with another person, the new transcribe mode reads translated speech directly in your ear, helping you understand the gist of what’s being said during longer listening experiences. Transcribe mode is launching initially for French, German, Italian and Spanish speakers to translate English speech.
• Attention Alerts: an experimental feature that notifies you of important things happening around you—your dog barking, baby crying or an emergency vehicle driving by with sirens ringing—and lowers the volume of your content momentarily to alert you to what’s going on.
• More: Toggle to turn off/on touch controls and some useful Assistant commands

Beyond new features, Google is also throwing a few fixes into the 550 update. Those fixes include improved call connection stability, improved media playback stability, as well as an issue fix for when an earbuds fails to connect when removed from the case.

Included Fixes

• Improved connection stability during calls
• Better autorecovery when one or both earbuds lose connection
• Improved media playback stability for phones that have software audio encoding
• Fixed issue where one earbud fails to connect when removed from the case

That’s a pretty solid update right there.

This update will roll out to all Pixel Buds starting this week and will happen automatically when the Buds are connected to an Android 6.0+ device, so long as they have the latest Pixel Buds app (version number 1.0.327368352).

// Google