Everything new in Google TV on Android 14 [Gallery]

Ben Schoon | Jun 8 2023 - 5:00 am PT

Android TV updates rarely bring major changes to the user experience, but Android 14 does actually bring some important tweaks to Google TV. With the first beta now available, here’s everything we’ve found that’s new.

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Accessibility is now a top-level setting
System-wide bold text, scaling, and color correction
Audio descriptions
New Power & Energy icon
Stop expecting Google TV’s biggest updates with Android versions

Accessibility is now a top-level setting

The core focus of Android TV 14, at least from what we can see in this first beta, is accessibility.

We’ll get into the changes below, but the first notable tweak is that Google TV’s settings menu now shows accessibility as a top-level setting. This means it’s now easier to access these settings, which previously were pushed one layer down under the “System” section.

System-wide bold text, scaling, and color correction

Diving into the new accessibility options, there’s a lot, starting with new options for text scaling and bold text. Text scaling can bring text down to 85% size or up to 130% size. This option itself isn’t new, but it was never found in accessibility settings, previously being located under “Display & sound.”

An entirely new setting is “Bold text,” a toggle that does exactly what it says. Turning the setting on will make all text across the system very bold, which could help those who struggle with eyesight, just as the text scaling might.

There’s also a new menu for color correction which includes a few alternate color modes and a grayscale option.

Audio descriptions

Google is also enabling audio descriptions as a system-wide toggle. This won’t work on all content, but content that is supported will have descriptions read aloud of “what’s happening on screen in supported movies and shows.”

New Power & Energy icon

A very small tweak we noticed in Google TV’s settings in Android 14 is a new icon for the Power & Energy menu, which adopts a leaf icon. In previous versions, it was a light bulb.

Stop expecting Google TV’s biggest updates with Android versions

With all of that out of the way, it feels like an appropriate time to remind everyone that major Android OS upgrades are not very important to Google TV and Android TV devices. As seen here, they can bring some notable upgrades, but it’s not all that common. The same was the case in Android TV 12 and the now-not-releasing Android TV 13.

Regular security updates are far more important, which is why it’s good to have options like Google’s ever-more-regular Chromecast patches and Walmart’s super-cheap Onn box, which miraculously gets fairly frequent updates despite costing less than a month of Netflix. As for actual new features, the vast majority of new features in Google TV come via app and server-side updates.

Kyle Bradshaw contributed to this article.