Will the big, new Audio Emoji button let you try the Pixel feature?

2024 hasn’t been a year without a few unexpected surprises, and one of the strangest surprises came this spring when Google unveiled. Audio Emojiis basically a tool that provides the Google Phone app with a new soundboard annoying entertain the person on the other end of your call as long as it’s another Pixel user. Since its debut, we’ve seen Google update Audio Emoji with new ones holiday sound effectsbut now that we’ve revealed a possible redesign for the Phone’s user interface, we turn our attention to what’s next.

Right now, if you want to access Audio Emoji, you need to start by tapping the More button at the bottom of the Phone screen. Here you’ll find controls for things like putting a call on hold or switching to a video call. While this works perfectly, it doesn’t look great, so Google might think of another way to extract Audio Emoji.

Looking at the 157.0.705349516-publicbeta version of the Phone by Google app, we found that we can access the new Phone UI, which features Audio Emoji as a large, very prominent button that stays active above your main control row at all times. (h/t jdvvaghela on Telegram).

While the idea of ​​Google trying to unveil a feature like Audio Emoji makes a fair amount of sense, we’ll admit that going with a fairly large button feels a little odd. Called back a bit, we could see this as a permanent addition to the Phone app, but right now it still feels like an ongoing kind of experiment.

Aside from the new Audio Emoji button for calling, we also see the Phone playing with the placement for the video call button, leaving it in the top right corner of the screen. This will likely be a less controversial change, but at this point it’s anyone’s guess whether any of these UI tweaks will have a lasting impact.