Touchscreens are okay, but what about putting those pipes to better use? The description of one of Google's talks at I/O later this month points to an interesting new feature called Voice Access. Basically, instead of touching the phone, you talk to it to control apps. So essentially Star Trek? That'd be rad.

Developers who take advantage of Voice Actions will be able to design apps that use voice commands instead of touch input. Google says this service will add very little development overhead and will give users "access to their Android device through voice alone."

It's unclear if this would be something exclusive to Android M or if Google could implement Voice Access with a Play Services update. We'll probably find out shortly after I/O kicks off. The session covering Voice Access is called "Your app, now available hands-free," and will apparently be offered twice during I/O, but I only see it on the schedule once at 1PM on the 28th. That's very shortly after the keynote ends.

UPDATE: 2015/06/01 4:58pm PDT BY

As readers may have noticed, the Voice Access session mentioned in this post was removed from the Google I/O schedule, and - to our knowledge - the subject matter wasn't covered during the conference.

We have reached out to Google for clarification on when we might hear something about Voice Access (and Nearby, which was also originally slated for this year's conference), and will update this post again if new information becomes available.

Source: Google I/O Schedule