“Hey Google, type.”
I've composed much of this review with my voice. That’s thanks to Assistant voice typing, one of many new software features in Google’s new Pixel 6 smartphone. In any text field, you can say the magic command above and start talking. It even works when the phone is offline. It might sound like an ordinary voice dictation feature, but it's incredibly fast on the Pixel. It’s also surprisingly accurate, and it can adapt to your speech as you use it. For example, it didn’t understand when I spoke out my Korean friend’s last name, but after typing it out twice, the phone now spells the name correctly every time.
I'm suddenly voice-typing everywhere. Emails, Slacks, text messages. It's just so much faster than typing. Voice typing is not perfect—I've had to quickly clarify to a colleague why I said “sex” when I meant “six”—but the Pixel can understand context to a certain degree. When I want to send a message I can say “Send,” and I can say “Next” when I want to go to another paragraph. The phone can differentiate between when I want to include those words in a sentence and when I mean them as commands. That's pretty rad.
This all stems from a new processor powering the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. Instead of using a Qualcomm chip like nearly every other Android phone, these phones run on a Tensor chip, which has been custom-built by Google to efficiently run sophisticated machine-learning models without needing to rely on a cloud server. You can read more about it in our story from August, but to put it briefly, nearly every existing feature on a Pixel, from the night mode in the camera to voice dictation, runs markedly better thanks to this chip.
Tensor is the glue that helps create some rather magical experiences on Google's new phones, and it's aided by the best hardware in a Pixel ever. That's no exaggeration. Flaws are few here, and Google's respectable prices—$599 for the Pixel 6 and $899 for the Pixel 6 Pro—make for a wonderful combo. The Pixel 6 is undeniably the best top-end Android phone for most people.
You might be wondering how the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro fare with the standard phone stuff. Well, you can find all the nitty-gritty technical details right here, including their differences, but the two pretty much have every feature you'd want in a high-end smartphone.