Android now allows you to use facial gestures to control your phone

Android has some of the most useful accessibility tools to help people with disabilities make the most of their devices. However, some of these accessibility features are very convenient on any mobile phone beyond its main purpose. The latest Android 12 beta has such a beautiful feature that allows you to use different facial expressions to control your Android phone.

As people have discovered XDA developers, Android Accessibility Suite 12.0.0 included with Android 12 beta 4 includes a new “camera switch” function. When enabled, it will use the front camera to see if you are looking at the screen and recognize facial gestures.

How to use facial gestures to navigate your Android phone

Various facial expressions can trigger actions on Android phones. For example, you can open your mouth to bring up the notification panel or raise your eyebrows to return to the home screen. The image below shows a list of all facial gestures that you can customize to perform different actions.

The actions you can map to the above gestures include accessing notifications, scrolling forward/backward, touching and holding, navigating to the home screen, selecting, etc.

You can also customize the size and duration of facial gestures. When using, you will see a continuous notification icon to tell you that the phone’s camera is in use.

Although the new facial gesture tool has appeared on Android 12, it does not seem to be unique to the platform. Suntec Able to load the updated Android Accessibility Suite APK on mobile phones running Android 11 to access this feature. If you want to give it a try, you can do the same. Alternatively, you can also wait for the stable Android 12 version or download the Android 12 beta.

After you have the new version of Android Accessibility Suite, you can find this feature under the Switch Access tool.