Last month, Google celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Chrome OS by releasing Chrome OS 89 loaded with a slew of new features. Now, the tech giant has announced the release of Chrome OS 90, which again brings multiple new features to the operating system. According to the update server, the latest update is ready to be downloaded by a good majority of Chromebooks. The latest Chrome OS update comes just a week after the desktop update for Google Chrome.
Chrome OS 90 is already here and like with many recent updates, it also brings a few productivity-focused features with it. Here’s what Chrome OS 90 has in store for you:
Live Captions
Live Captioning is available on Google’s almost all products, and it has also been “live” on the Chrome browser for a while now. But now, Google will soon roll out this feature to the Chrome browser on Chrome OS. The feature will be accessible via the Accessibility menu in the system tray or Chrome OS settings and will allow real-time, live captions on any media with audio.
Enhanced Launcher Search
The latest Chrome OS is also bringing the enhanced launcher search that you can access by pressing the “Everything Button” a.k.a. the search key. When a user taps the search key, it will pop up the app launcher where they can search for apps as well as files in their local storage and Drive. Not just this, you can even do a Google search from the same pop-up. With the updated Chrome OS version to v90, the Launcher’s search feature will now include things like weather, math computation, and many other helpful results.
Scan Tools to Scan from Your Printer
Another exciting feature that has come to the stable channel of ChromeOS with Chrome OS 90 is the long-awaited Scan tool. Now, if users have a compatible network printer, they can open the Scan app on their Chromebook and scan files to the local storage or Google Drive. The app will detect the DPI settings of the printer and give them a preview of their scanned documents right in the app.
Diagnostic App
Chrome OS 90 has now officially brought a Diagnostic App that includes useful information such as the device’s specific CPU/memory configuration, temperature, battery charge and health, and some system tests. Also, the system web app (SWA) will house the Chrome Network Health tools that are used to test the device’s connectivity, which, however, is still in the works. If your Chromebook fails some of the hardware tests in the Diagnostics app, you can submit feedback to developers directly from within the app.
These were some of the new features that have been announced by Google in the Chrome OS 90. But there may be some more unannounced features that we may get to know in the coming days, which we will post here. Stay tuned.
