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Google’s Soli chip means you could control your phone without touching it



In the run-up to the release of the Pixel 4 smartphone, Google did things a little differently. Instead of waiting for the leaks to come out about the upcoming device, it started publishing information about the new phone on its Twitter account, from releasing the first images to dropping details on the phone’s new Motion Sense tech.

The Motion Sense feature on the Pixel 4, if you haven’t come across it before, is focused on improving how people use their smartphone, from speeding up how the phone reacts to being unlocked to skipping songs on Spotify and swiping away alarms without having to touch the screen. 

This was all made possible thanks to Soli, a tiny chip which uses radar technology inside the front of the device, created by the Research & Machine Intelligence team at Google, and led by product manager Brandon Barbello. It’s worth mentioning that this wasn’t the team that made the Pixel’s face unlock, which has been criticised for not being secure enough. A solution for this should be shipped early this year.


“What makes Soli so exciting is at its core it’s about making devices more human,” Barbello tells the Standard. “Where tech is now, the verbal understanding is improving fast but in terms of body language, that’s very nascent still.”

Barbello’s team wants to change that, by using Soli to empower our gadgets to understand us more so they can be more useful in our day-to-day lives. Here’s how it all works. 

How Soli began

Soli started as a project in Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP), the company’s in-house tech incubator. The idea was to create a miniature radar that could understand human motion and then use this information to make devices smarter. An early idea for Soli was to feature the tech in a smartwatch though this never came to the fore. 

Barbello began working on Soli in 2016, before the first Google Pixel phone was even released, as a way to bridge some of the machine learning research he’d been working on with Google’s new move into devices. “At the time, it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” he says. 

The Soli chip in the Pixel 4 uses radar technology. The chip emits electromagnetic waves in a broad beam. When an object moves, say a human hand, the chip interprets what the object is doing. If the hand is swiping to change a song for instance, the chip detects that and then uses AI to carry out the appropriate response for the device.  

It sounds relatively straightforward but the process to bring Soli into the Pixel was far from it. To get an idea of how it could work in a phone, Barbello’s team hacked together Pixel 2 “frankenphones” which were modified to include the Soli chip. Shrinking the chip down so it could fit into a smartphone wasn’t easy – Google has also been criticised for having a thick frame around the Pixel 4 screen which houses the Soli chip alongside the front camera and speaker. “There was a whole phase of chips in big boxes, to phone-shaped things, then to an actual phone hacked with Soli,” he explains. 

The original Soli chip, shown in the clear box was 11.5 inches, before being shrunk down to a mere 5mm to fit in the Pixel 4 

Choosing the ways Soli works 

On the Pixel 4, the Soli-powered Motion Sense works in a few ways. One is the swipe gesture, whilst another way allows the phone to be aware of people around it, so the face unlock function is ready to go when necessary – it takes about one second to unlock. 

This doesn’t seem like much for now, but Barbello says this is because it’s a “foundational year” for the tech. “We’re trying to introduce people and familiarise themselves with Soli as a new paradigm.” 

Training the algorithms in Motion Sense to get to this point were also a substantial part of the battle. Take something like the swipe gesture. “When you ask someone to swipe, people do it in different ways and in different places. We collected millions upon millions on real swipes, of non-swipes, and training it to the point where moving a coffee cup across the phone wouldn’t work but a real one did,” he explains.  

How Google’s Motion Sense works in the Pixel 4 

The radar tech inside that powers Soli is still very much in its infancy. “Radar artificial intelligence is where machine vision was 30 years ago. There are no textbooks, no university courses. It took many years internally for us to develop the intuition for what the signal is and what it can do.”

So we can expect to see more features and functions from Soli and Motion Sense in the future? Barbello is bullish. “There’s a bit of science and a bit of art that is happening here and we intend to build on it and pay forward for years upon years in terms of where technology is going.” 

Looking to the Soli-powered future 

At the moment, Soli is in smartphones. But what about our future beyond smartphones? How can radar tech affect how we interact with future gadgets and devices? “There must be a thing that comes after the smartphone, that’s even more human and applicable to our lives and how we as people work. We think that Soli could be a big piece of what makes the next device possible.” 

The Soli chip lives in the top of the Pixel 4 smartphone, next to the camera and speaker (Google)

There’s no concrete plans on the other devices a technology like Soli could work in but Barbello says there is potential for other devices in Google’s portfolio – imagine waving your hand over a Nest Mini to turn up the volume or a laptop darkening its screen with a gesture – as well as third-party products. Soli could be the new Google Assistant – at CES this week Google announced its AI assistant has 500 million monthly users, thanks to its widespread use in Google products as well as things like smart lightbulbs and laptops. 

“My Assistant understands the exact words I’m saying but the inflection of what my body is doing is missing. Soli could be an extra channel in the bandwidth of how a device can understand me.”

It’s exciting to be at the forefront of technology and predicting how we’ll be living and interacting with gadgets in the future. “As the journey goes, it’s a matter of art and creation to this where you have to believe this is going to work and work hard at it until it clicks,” says Barbello. “And when it does, it’s super rewarding.” 

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