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Can confirm, despite the recent updates, the gestures are gimmicky and sometimes activate when not needed e.g song skips to the next one when reaching to pick up the phone.

The only truly useful thing is waking up the phone on detecting motion nearby, which could probably be done with a much simpler sensor.

From the videos I've seen, Soli has similar gestures to my old 2nd gen Moto X from 5+ years ago. It was neat for some things, but I don't really miss it.

Yep. I have the Pixel 4 as well and keep it disabled. Needs a killer app.

They didn't put Soli in the Pixel 4 for the users. They did it to gather sensor data for their ML dataset, for future applications.

The user-facing features are just there to encourage slightly more usage and justify including it.

disclaimer: This is pure speculation.