ChromeOS 137 is rolling out with immersive audio, new accessibility tools and more

The latest version of ChromeOS is now beginning its journey to the Stable channel, and M137 is bringing a handful of interesting new features with it. While there isn’t one massive, headlining feature, this update delivers a very cool new audio experience for everyone, alongside some important new tools for accessibility and for IT admins managing fleets of devices. Let’s take a look at what’s new.

A new immersive audio experience with crosstalk cancellation

This is the standout feature for most users in ChromeOS 137. A new “crosstalk cancellation” feature aims to provide a far more immersive audio experience when you’re just using your Chromebook’s internal speakers.

According to Google’s announcement, this feature helps you “feel the audio surrounding your head instead of coming from the geometric position of the internal speaker.” It sounds a lot like a virtual surround sound system, and it should benefit any audio you play, but will be especially noticeable when playing games or watching videos that have spatialized audio tracks. The goal is to give you that “all-around direction as if wearing a headset,” without actually needing to plug anything in. We can’t wait to test this one out.

New accessibility tools for braille users

Accessibility continues to be a key focus for the ChromeOS team. In this update, ChromeVox now includes a new command that can display spoken text as braille captions on a connected USB or Bluetooth braille display. The new keyboard shortcut for this is Search + O + C.

More controls for managed devices

For IT admins in schools and businesses, M137 adds a couple of useful new controls:

• Face Control Policy: A new policy, FaceGazeEnabled, will allow administrators to have more granular control over who can access the Face Control accessibility feature on an organizational level.
• Event-based log collection: This feature will make troubleshooting device issues more efficient. When an event like an OS crash or an update failure occurs, admins will see a notification and Google will upload only the logs relevant to that specific event, making it easier to diagnose the problem.

As always, the update to ChromeOS 137 will be rolling out progressively over the coming days and weeks, so you may not see it on your device immediately. You can check for the update by heading to Settings > About ChromeOS > Check for updates. It’s a solid update with a little something for everyone, and that new audio feature has us particularly intrigued.