Wanna make your own Android ping tone? Ask Gemini
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Custom phone rings and notification sounds are never more than a minute away — once you know how to ask.
Wanna make your own Android ping tone? Ask Gemini
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Custom phone rings and notification sounds are never more than a minute away — once you know how to ask.
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Credit: Google / JR Raphael
By now, you probably know my stance on Gemini and other generative AI gobbledegook — right?
In short: It’s an insanely powerful form of technology (obviously). But it’s also wildly inaccurate and ineffective as an all-purpose answer engine, and by cramming it into every last nook and cranny, Google is doing a serious disservice to its users — and to itself.
That being said, generative AI can be incredibly useful. The key is simply to frame it as a purpose-specific tool for the right type of limited task as opposed to treating it as the end-all answer for everything, as most tech players seem overly eager to do these days.
Here in the land of Android, I’m always looking for purpose-specific ways Gemini can make our lives easier. Over time, I’ve found those ideas often aren’t the big headline-making features Google and other tech companies market but rather random little off-the-beaten-path possibilities that rarely get emphasized.
Today, I’ve got a new Gemini Android advantage for you to explore — another one that I’ve never seen advertised anywhere but that works brilliantly well and solves a long-standing limitation of our modern mobile gizmos.
It’ll take you all of a minute to master and cost you precisely $0 to pull off. Ready?
Gemini’s custom sound advantage
This Gemini-provided power-up very much follows the path of thinking about AI as a limited, purpose-specific tool for a narrow task — the exact sort of area where AI excels.
I won’t keep you waiting: Gemini, as I discovered whilst poking around within it recently, is really good at generating unique, custom ringtones and notification sounds based on your personal preferences and specifications.
It almost seems obvious, once you think about it. But I sure hadn’t thought about it up until now — and I suspect most other folks haven’t, either.
The advantage here goes beyond just superficial silliness, too: By creating your own custom ringtones and notification noises, you can know exactly what event your phone is alerting you to within a split second of hearing the associated sound — without having to rely on the same limited and often underwhelming pool of default options that everyone else uses (or, worse yet, having to lean on shady, ad-ridden “ringtone apps” to find mediocre alternatives). That means you’ll know within a heartbeat when your boss or an especially important client is calling or if an incoming call is a random unknown number.
On the notification front, you can create a specific, memorable sound to accompany a new message in an important work-related Slack channel and a different distinctive sound for a high-priority email. They’ll all be sounds that you make and identity with and that no one else in the world uses. That’s pretty powerful.
And creating these custom sounds couldn’t be much easier, either, once you realize it’s possible:
First, just fire up Gemini on your phone (or on any device you’re using) and tell it what you want. So, for instance…
Create a soft, subtle ringtone that’s reminiscent of an old office phone sound.
Create a ringtone that sounds like an 8-bit version of The Final Countdown.
Create a one-second high-pitched notification sound that brings to mind the Super Mario Bros theme song.
Create a short notification sound that mimics the Back to the Future time circuits noise.
Create a notification sound that sounds like a robot saying “ALERT, ALERT!”
The only limit is your imagination. And if you’re not feeling especially imaginative, you can even ask Gemini to give you a list of ideas for distinctive, memorable ringtones or notification sounds based on geeky nostalgia, 80s pop-metal, or whatever it is that tickles your fancy.
Once you’ve sent a request, Gemini will — somewhat confusingly — spit back a big honkin’ block of HTML code. This is because, for reasons unknown, the system can’t or won’t just provide a sound file directly. Go figure.
Ask, and ye shall receive: Gemini’s ringtone-creating prowess in action.JR Raphael, Foundry
But from there, it’s just one more quick step to get the file you need: Click or tap the copy icon in the upper-right corner of that code block — the icon that looks kinda like two stacked, rounded rectangles — to copy the entire chunk of code onto your system clipboard.
Then open up your browser and go to the website JSFiddle.net. It’s a well-known, long-standing tool for running code like HTML right in your browser and seeing the result, and it works entirely in the browser and without any downloads or special permissions required.
Tap or click into the “HTML” field, then paste in the code from your clipboard (by long-pressing any open space, on Android, and selecting “Paste” from the menu that appears). Click or tap the “Run” button, and — ta-da: You’ll see a player to listen to your custom Gemini-generated sound and a button to download it.
The JSFiddle website makes it easy to take Gemini’s output and both play and download a sound file from right within your web browser.JR Raphael, Foundry
Provided you like what you hear, hit the button to download the file, then head into the Sound section of your Android system settings to save it and make it available for applying as any kind of alert or ringtone. The exact steps for doing that will vary from one type of Android device to another, but on a Pixel or another phone that follows Google’s core Android interface, you’ll tap on either “Ringtone” or “Notification,” then tap “My Sounds” and tap the plus icon to import your own custom file from your phone’s local storage.
On a Samsung device, you’ll start the same way but look for the plus icon within the “Ringtone” section of the settings, then tap the “Folders” tab to find your locally downloaded files. Samsung doesn’t make it easy to add in your own custom notification sounds, annoyingly, so what you’ll have to do is open up the Google Files app, find the file you downloaded in your “Downloads” folder, then tap the three-dot icon alongside it to copy it to the folder called “Notifications.” Once the file is in that folder, it should show up as a notification noise option within the Samsung Android settings.
And remember: You can use Android’s notification channels to set specific sounds to be used for different types of alerts, even within a single app — and you can use the Google Contacts app to set custom ringtones for different people, too.
With Gemini as your personal composer, you’ll never be stuck with generic overused sounds again — and you’ll always know exactly what’s happening from the first note of whatever noise you hear.
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