Pixel Journal gets some handy upgrades, and may soon tidy up your rambling entries

Pixel Journal is still a fairly young addition to Google’s Pixel lineup, and the company doesn’t seem finished tinkering with it yet. A new version of the app is now rolling out with several useful quality-of-life upgrades. But there are also clues under the hood suggesting that there’s nore to come, as we’ve uncovered signs of a feature that Google appears to be preparing for a future Pixel Journal release.

The latest Pixel Journal version brings some changes that will already look familiar if you caught our March teardown of the app. At the time, we spotted customizable reminder times and new Compact and Full layouts for photos and videos, although both features were still in development. They’re now available to all app users.

The reminder controls let you choose whether Pixel Journal nudges you in the morning, afternoon, or evening, with the app showing approximate times of 7 AM, 2 PM, and 9 PM. Meanwhile, the media setting lets you switch between a Compact arrangement that groups images together and a Full layout that gives individual photos and videos more space. Those two additions are both handy, so it’s good to see our earlier findings make it across the finish line. You can see how they look in the images above.

There are also a couple of changes we hadn’t previously spotted. The first adds some much-needed friction when deleting an entry. Pixel Journal currently deletes an entry immediately after you tap Delete, with no confirmation and no way back. The updated behavior first asks you to confirm the deletion, then offers a brief Undo option for about five to ten seconds afterward. Given the sort of stuff people are likely to keep in a journal, that extra safety net seems overdue. The images below show how the new setup looks in the app.

Pixel Journal is also expanding the Health Connect data it can use for personalized writing inspiration. The app can already make use of activity information, such as exercise and other physical activity, and it will now ask for permission to read sleep data as well. Health Connect treats Activity and Sleep as separate data categories, so granting access to one doesn’t automatically grant Journal access to the other.

If you allow the new permission, Pixel Journal could use your sleep information alongside the other data it already has access to when suggesting things to write about. It might be an indicator of my age, but how well I slept is certainly a topic I often touch on when adding to my diary, so it makes sense for Pixel Journal to at least offer the option to include this data.

The features above are rolling out, but we’ve also found evidence of an AI-powered Auto format feature in the works that could clean up your journal entries. Strings in the app refer to a feature called “Auto format,” and more strings add extra clues about how it may work. Here are the strings we found:

• Auto format
• Once you’re done speaking or typing, auto format can clean up your entry
• Expressive
• Simple
• You need to write at least count words to auto format an entry in expressive mode.
• You need to write at least count words to auto format an entry in simple mode.

The second of those strings suggests AI will step up after you’ve completed an entry to tidy up what you’ve written or dictated, and there also appear to be at least two ways of doing that: “Simple” and “Expressive.” Google hasn’t spelled out what separates the modes yet, but the names give us a reasonable idea. Simple could stick more closely to your original wording while cleaning up the structure or presentation, whereas Expressive may take a little more freedom and artistic license with how the entry looks.

Another pair of strings says you’ll need to write a minimum number of words before Auto format works, with separate thresholds mentioned for Simple and Expressive modes. We don’t yet know what those minimums are. One possible reason for the restriction is that the AI may need sufficient context to meaningfully reorganize or polish an entry without hallucinating or trying to add a heap of flourish to a one-line entry, but that’s speculation at this point.

While there’s no guarantee that this feature will eventually make a stable release, the strings are a pretty strong indication that Google is looking at ways to let AI do more than simply inspire your next Pixel Journal entry. Given that journaling is often something you dash out at the end of the day before bed, letting the app tidy up the entry for you seems like a sensible addition.