Google’s Circle to Search Learns a New Trick: Translate While You Scroll

If you’ve been using Circle to Search on Android, you already know how handy it can be. Hold down the navigation bar, draw a quick circle around something on your screen, and Google gives you more info without kicking you out of the app. It’s quick, simple, and in the short time it’s been around, it’s become one of those features you don’t think about until you’re without it.

One of the big uses so far has been translation. Staring at a menu while traveling? Or trying to make sense of a webpage that isn’t in your language? Circle to Search could handle it. But there was always one catch: if the text stretched beyond what fit on your screen, you had to keep restarting the process. Scroll a little, stop, restart. Scroll a bit more, repeat. Not exactly smooth.

Google’s fixing that with a new option called Scroll and Translate. Now, once you’ve got the text in view, you can activate Circle to Search, tap the translate button, and choose the new scrolling mode. From there, it keeps translating as you move through the page—no interruptions, no resetting. It even works if you bounce between apps.

It’s not hard to imagine the real-world use case here. Think about reading a menu in another country: instead of translating starters, mains, and desserts one section at a time, you can just skim through the whole thing in your own language. Much less hassle.

Google says the rollout starts this week, with Samsung Galaxy phones first in line. Pixel owners and other Android devices should see it soon after, though it’s not yet live on the Android 16 QPR2 beta builds.

This isn’t the first upgrade Circle to Search has picked up recently. Earlier this year Google added song recognition and a way to translate an entire page in one go—as long as you can load the whole page on screen. The new scrolling option fills in the gap for everything else.

Step by step, Circle to Search is turning into more than a fun trick. It’s becoming a core part of Android, blending search, translation, and little bits of AI in a way that actually saves time.