Google makes it even easier for you to plan a trip on your smartphone

Whether you’re a weekend traveler or a gallivanting globetrotter, Google is making it even easier to make travel plans on a smartphone. For starters,  the web giant says it’s enhancing the way mobile search deals with hotel bookings by introducing improved price filtering and easier-to-find amenity information. It’s also offering the ability to book right from the search page instead of having to click through to potentially multiple websites to input dates and details over and over in an effort to find what you’re looking for. It’s linking up different aspects of a trip search, too. So, for example, if you search for a flight in Google Flights, you can also tap on “Hotels” at the top of the page for a quick route to explore hotel availability and prices in your destination city, with the destination automatically entered. Even better, the dates that you selected for the flights will already be selected for the accommodation page, saving you from having to input them again. It also works if you switch from the accommodation page to flights. Just below the main row of tabs on the search page you’ll also see “more destinations.” Tapping on this, as you may have guessed, lets you explore other destinations, weekend getaways, and alternative places that may appeal. “You’ll also see a feature called Your Trips that helps you see, at a glance, all your upcoming and past travel reservations from Gmail,” Google’s Eric Zimmerman wrote in a post outlining the new features. This data is private and viewable only by you, though you can email information about your reservations to friends and family from this section, and also make edits and access them offline using Google Trips, a travel-focused iOS and Android app released by the company in 2016. If you’ve gotten used to exploring travel options using your smartphone instead of your PC, then Google’s more streamlined process should appeal to you and, as the company itself says, “This feature doesn’t just help you plan your travels, it also connects you to travel companies who help you square away those plans.” Mobile users will start seeing the changes in the next few days. YouTube Music just rolled out a small but surprisingly useful change that makes it way easier to manage your listening experience, especially if you’re someone who’s constantly adjusting the volume between tracks. As part of its latest update, the app now lets you double-tap the “Volume normalizer” setting directly from the Now Playing screen instead of burying it in the settings menu. That should make it a bit easier to accomplish two things: not damaging your eardrums and liking songs. Here’s how it works, according to Android Authority. When you’re playing a song, just tap the three-dot menu in the top right corner of the Now Playing screen. You’ll see a new option called “Consistent volume.” Tap that and it’ll toggle volume normalization on or off right there, with no digging through submenus required. It’s a pretty straightforward option. At a recent TED talk, Google’s exciting XR smartglasses were demonstrated to the public for the very first time. While we’ve seen the smartglasses before, it has always been in highly polished videos showcasing Project Astra, where we never get a true feel for the features and functionality in the real world. All that has now changed, and our first glimpse of the future is very exciting. However, future is very much the operative word.  Google appears to be preparing a freemium version of its Gemini Veo 2 video generation tool, based on details uncovered in a recent APK teardown. Veo 2, a generative AI tool designed to create videos from text prompts, has so far been locked behind Gemini Advanced. But that may be changing soon. According to Android Police, strings found in the app’s code indicate that some form of access may be coming to the free tier, giving a wider group the chance to try out AI video generation without paying for a subscription.