Android smartphones get fart button | The standard

Android smartphone owners will soon be able to spice up their phone calls with drum rolls, applause and, yes, a fart sound. Tough luck, iPhone users.

Young people use their smartphones for almost everything, except making phone calls. Maybe because you can’t use emoji while calling? That’s what a researcher at Google must have thought. Because there is now a test version of the Phone by Google app (simply called Telephone app in Dutch) where you are offered six buttons for a number of sound effects. The new feature was spotted by the news site 9to5google.

That ‘sound emoji’buttons look like familiar emoji. But you use them during the conversation to aurally underline your own statements or to provide those of your conversation partners with an appropriate (or inappropriate) response. Like some radio DJs used to do. For now it seems to be about applause, laughter, party noise, sad trombone, ‘sting’ (ba-dum-tsss!) – and the butt trumpet, represented by the ‘laughing poop’.

The Phone by Google app is the default phone app on Google’s own Pixel smartphones. Other smartphones, such as those from Samsung, usually use their own app to make calls. But the Google app can be installed through the Play Store. For users in Belgium, the sound emoji don’t seem to be available yet, even for those who sign up for the beta version of the Phone app (we tried).

So you will be safe for a while, but perhaps not for long. Google will hold its annual Google I/O conference in two weeks. That is traditionally the moment when the company tries to amaze the world with its latest innovations. There is a good chance that the company wants to go all out with the sound emoji. Although most attention will probably focus on steps the company has taken in the field of artificial intelligence.

The planned French government measures to keep smartphones out of the hands of children do not come a day too soon.