Google Photos updated with new album tools and description editing
You’ve probably had a chance to play around with the new Google Photos app by now, and Google has just added in some new tweaks and features to help us keep better track of all our pictures.
The latest update brings Google Photos for Android up to version 1.2. Along with a selection of bug fixes and performance improvements, Google Photos now allows users to change the cover photo for their albums, and photos can now be added and removed from a particular album from the same screen.
To select a picture as the album cover, click on the picture, selection options and then you can see a new feature to “use as album cover”. You can also remove the picture from the album cover using this menu, and the album will go back to the default image it chose. The add and remove buttons are also located in this list.
Other changes include the ability to add, edit and view a description for each individual photo in your collection. To use this feature, just give the information button (i) a quick tap and pick the option to “add a description”.
Navigation and organization have also seen some tweaks. You can now tap-and-hold a date header to select all of the photos from that particular day, and pulling down from the top of the screen will now exit a search.
If you haven’t updated yet, you can download Google Photo for free from the Play Store.
Google Voice transcriptions will soon actually make sense
One of the most prevalent qualms users have of Google Voice is its occasionally accurate (but usually absurd) interpretations of what’s being said. However, with the upcoming public debut of the Project Fi cellular service, Google has reportedly greatly improved its transcription service. According to a post on the company’s blog, Google’s managed to reduce its transcription error rates by nearly 50 percent by leveraging a “long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network.” Users don’t even have to change their routine to take advantage of the new system, just keep using Voice and Fi as they always have.
[Image Credit: shutterstock]
Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Google
Source: Google Blog
Google Store Back to School promotion begins, save up to $30 on a new Chromebook
Google is getting a head start for the new upcoming school year by launching its back to school promotion on many products in the Google Store. However, it seems like the only new sales we’re seeing are on select Acer Chromebooks.
Chromebooks are phenomenal options for schooling, but unfortunately, the discounts aren’t something to write home about. For instance, the Acer Chromebook 15 now costs $319.99, $30 off the original price tag, the Acer Chromebook 13 costs $229.99, $20 off the original price tag, and so on.
Disappointingly, many of the sales on the Google Store are price cuts we’ve already seen in the past. Many of these supposed price cuts are also available from other retailers like Amazon on a regular basis.
Either way, there’s nothing wrong with saving money, and if you can’t find any of Acer’s Chromebooks on sale somewhere else, you can save yourself some money through the Google Store from now until likely just before school begins. Hopefully we’ll see some better deals and price cuts as time goes on, but it certainly isn’t likely.
On another note, if you’re looking for something a bit heftier, Woot.com almost always has some great sales running on desktops and laptops of all kinds.
source: Google Store
Come comment on this article: Google Store Back to School promotion begins, save up to $30 on a new Chromebook
Google improves accuracy of Google Voice and Project Fi voicemail transcriptions by 49%
Google today took to its official blog to announce that Google Voice voicemails are now 49 percent less confusing, thanks to user-submitted feedback. Google Voice is notorious for creating terrible transcriptions from voicemails, but things might just be getting better.
Here’s how Google was able to do it:
…We asked users if they would kindly share some of their voicemails for research and system improvements. Thanks to those who participated, we are happy to announce an improved voicemail system in Google Voice and Project Fi that delivers more accurate transcriptions. Using a (deep breath) long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network (whew!), we cut our transcription errors by 49%.
If you’re a Google Voice or a Project Fi user, you should now begin to see better transcriptions. Keep in mind that it’s not going to be entirely fixed, but cutting errors by 49% is actually quite a leap. Users will no doubt see it improve even more over time as Google continues to expand its neural network responsible for these fixes.
source: Google
Come comment on this article: Google improves accuracy of Google Voice and Project Fi voicemail transcriptions by 49%
Google’s immersive storytelling app launches on iOS
Google is getting serious about 360-degree video content. And it’s not only about supporting it through YouTube or, by extension, Cardboard. The search giant’s also behind an app called Spotlight Stories, which it created with Motorola in 2013 and has been on Android since. As of today, that application is also available for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad — as long as those devices are running a version of iOS 8. Google describes Spotlight Stories as a “mobile movie theater” that combines 3D and 2D animation with 360-degree spherical video, sphere audio and sensor-triggered interactions to create an immersive experience. Right now there are four stories you can watch: Buggy Night, Help, Duet and Windy Day, all of which are original and were created exclusively for Spotlight Stories.
Filed under: Mobile, Apple, Google
Via: TechCrunch
Source: App Store
YouTube has a new mobile app now, real 3D VR video coming soon
During a keynote speech tonight at the 6th annual Vidcon event, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a new version of its mobile app. Available on Android and mobile web browsers now (iOS coming soon), it makes it easier for creators to publish and edit directly in the app, and easier for viewers to subscribe to a channel with just one button touch (and with ten million of those touches, channel owners can earn the new Diamond play button reward). The redesign even puts your subscriptions and profile right at the top for easy access. This is also the version that adds the ability to watch those vertical videos in full screen, so expect that to come your way soon if you don’t have it already. One thing that’s not there yet? Support for real 3D virtual reality video, like the kind we’ve seen from NextVR. That’s coming soon, to take things a step further than the current 360-degree support (with 360-degree ads). According to Wojcicki, watch time is up 60 percent across devices, and 100 percent on mobile from last year, so we’d expect there’s a lot more planned to keep that growth going.
Virtual reality is coming to YouTube with 3D, 360-degree video. More details soon! #VidCon pic.twitter.com/PVJ1ElLly5
– YouTube Creators (@YTCreators) July 24, 2015
Lights, camera, upload! The new YouTube app lets you edit and share from your phone. #VidCon pic.twitter.com/K1cT9SuHti
– YouTube Creators (@YTCreators) July 24, 2015
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Google
Source: YouTube Blog
Google fights patent trolls by giving away patents
Last year, Google and a handful of other technology companies banded together to fight patent trolls — creating the License on Transfer Network (LOT). It’s a pretty good system, effectively protecting LOT members from patent litigation by giving all participants a royalty-free license to any patent that leaves the LOT network. Now, Google wants to expand the network’s ranks to include start-ups, and it’s offering new members a pretty nice welcome package: free patents.
Here’s the deal: The first 50 eligible startups to enroll in Google’s Patent Starter Program will be given access to the company’s non-organic (not originating from Google itself) patent portal, two years of membership in the LOT program (with membership fees waived) and two patents of their very own. There is a catch, though: the free intellectual property is a little random. Google will create a tailored list of 3-5 patents based on the startup’s business focus and allow them to choose two from that list. This means a company could wind up with a patent they don’t necessarily want — but a free patent is a free patent.
Even so, the free patents have a few extra rules: if participating companies leave the program before two years pass, ownership of the gifted patents revert back to Google. The patents can’t be used to sue other companies either — after all, this program is designed to help stop patent trolls, not encourage them. Check out Google’s official patent page for more details.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Google
Susanne Daniels jumping from MTV to YouTube
Susanne Daniels is exiting her post as programming chief at MTV to join YouTube in a newly created position leading the platform’s budding original content efforts.
As vice president of YouTube originals, Daniels will oversee development and production of content for the world’s highest-trafficked video source. The move isn’t expected to be a major shift in programming strategy for Google-owned YouTube, which is already pretty far along in its plan to expand its originals.
In April, YouTube revealed that select digital stars including the Fine Bros., Prank vs. Prank and Smosh would be part of a first wave who would get increased funding in order to realize more ambitious programming efforts than the more modest budgets that have marked the company’s efforts in the past.
Daniels will report to Robert Kyncl, global head of content and business operations at YouTube. Kyncl had spoken of needing to ramp up original efforts as YouTube prepares to take its digital native stars and take their programming efforts to the next level.
“Susanne is an executive whose incredible instincts have led her to consistently generate pop culture hits that audiences relate to and root for,” said Kyncl. “Susanne’s deep expertise in programming will be invaluable to us and our top creators and help them foster even more ambitious projects for YouTube.”
Part of what is driving YouTube’s originals efforts is the creeping challenge represented from fellow juggernauts like Facebook, which has seen its online video efforts gather considerable momentum over the last year, as well as upstarts like Vessel, led by former Hulu chief Jason Kilar. Both companies have been attempting to woo away digital celebrities from YouTube.
It’s a sign of maturation for the digital content space and its programming efforts that a seasoned TV veteran like Daniels, whose resume also includes high-profile stints at Lifetime and the WB, is taking on a new challenge at YouTube. While other digital power players like Netflix and Amazon have moved faster to advance their own premium long-form content initiatives, none have picked as prominent a TV executive as Daniels to lead their efforts.
It’s also a sign of the times that Daniels is stepping away from the helm at MTV, which was once the network perceived as being the leading brand among adolescent viewers, and joining YouTube as digital content alternatives have been blamed for stealing away younger consumers. Viacom, parent company for MTV, in particular has seen significant decreases in the Nielsen ratings among youth demos across many of its networks over the past year, though some of those losses can also be chalked up to the inability to measure changing content consumption across platforms.
Alex Carloss, who has led YouTube’s original programming efforts, will continue, with his team now reporting into Daniels.
Also among the first digital-native celebrities that will be part of the YouTube originals initiative is Joey Graceffa, who was named among the top 12 digital stars working today as part of Variety’s#Famechangers ranking.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, Google
How machine learning will revolutionize the mobile experience
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more hyped pairing of words right now than machine learning. It is being hailed as the wave of the future, but will it lead humanity to a bright new dawn, or usher in the age of our robot overlords?
We’re not going to get into the specifics on what machine learning is, suffice to say that it’s about machines sharing data, making predictions, and learning to improve on them without being explicitly programmed. If you want a full explanation, then check out our post What is machine learning?
What we want to explore here is just how machine learning is going to change the mobile experience. The rise of the smartphone is a serious boost for machine learning because it’s producing an enormous amount of useful data that can be mined, analyzed, and used to make predictions.
Google’s AI dreams are visual representations of a form of machine learning
Let’s start with a look at what machine learning is already doing for us.
Thank the machines
Few companies have done more to put machine learning in the spotlight than Google. The company has invested heavily in developing software models that can learn and applying them to ever-growing mountains of data. All of Google’s services benefit from this approach. Gmail can accurately root out spam without burying real emails, voice recognition in Android has improved dramatically, and image recognition used in Photos, Maps, and Image Search is growing more and more accurate.
Google wants to push things further with the predictive capabilities of Google Now. The contextual abilities of Now on Tap are based on machine learning. It can draw on Google’s huge knowledge base to work out what’s happening in the app you’re using and answer a contextual question. The example shown off at I/O was someone playing a Skrillex song in Spotify and asking “What’s his real name?” Now on Tap gave the correct answer (Sonny John Moore).
Machine learning is also being used to improve email further with Inbox. The idea of a smarter email inbox that can highlight truly important messages, automatically create reminders, and group relevant messages together is nothing new, but who else can draw on the kind of data that Google has?
There are a lot of other examples – when you type a search into Google and get the “Did you mean…?” suggestion, search results in general are partially based on machine learning, and most of the advertising you see is entirely determined by machines.
Of course, it’s not just Google harnessing the power of machine learning, all the big tech companies are. So let’s look at some of the exciting things it might deliver.
Amazing things machine learning could bring
There’s lots of potential for machine learning to improve our lives. Because it’s a method for analyzing big data and it can make predictions and then hone the model based on what happened, it can be applied to anything that data is collected on and it should continually improve itself. Here are a few things it could deliver to improve our mobile experience. This is by no means an exhaustive list:
- Translation – Forget about sticking a babelfish in your ear, machine learning could deliver real-time speech translation. Take a look at Microsoft’s Skype Translator Preview. There’s a delay and it doesn’t work perfectly, but it surely won’t be too long before we can have conversations in different languages accurately translated as we speak. And we’re not talking about robotic voices either, machine learning also has the potential to convey intonation and emphasis.
- Fitness – A lot of people use fitness wearables and apps now, but few understand how to apply the data they produce. What if you could get real insights and practical tips from your mobile? What if other data about your schedule and diet was factored in to determine when you should work out and what activity would give you the greatest boost in health and fitness? Machine learning can also be used to analyze the exercise you are getting, recognize distinct activities automatically, and improve your form.
- Battery – Most of us are still frustrated at the battery life of our smartphones and wearables. Machine learning could offer genuine insights into what’s guzzling that juice, and practical actions that would extend battery dramatically.
- Automation and prediction – Imagine Tasker, but without you having to create profiles. Machine learning could put the smart in your smartphone, by learning the way you use it and automatically triggering certain specific things. That could feed into the battery life we just mentioned. It could also be about correctly predicting what you need. Check out the examples in this Google patent, filed in 2012, covering things like smart volume adjustment, throwing up a suggested contact in the dialer as a limo driver when you’re at the airport, or automatically creating photo album and photo title names that are relevant.
- Recommendations – We already see a lot of this, but machine learning should improve it further. Whether you want to buy a new smartphone, download a new game, or listen to some music, there’s room for algorithms to find things you may like based on your past actions and data from other people. This also ties into predictions about what you’ll want at any given time based on past actions, time, location, schedule, and everything else the machines know about you.
Fears and failings
We can’t really realize the benefits of machine learning without large amounts of data, but that tends towards a generalized mass market view of what you might want. For machine learning to get really specific it has to be tempered with personal data. The potential usefulness is nicely highlighted by something like Google Now – if you don’t let Google collect data on you and track you, then Google Now isn’t very good at suggesting things.
If you have concerns about privacy, you might decide the potential damage outweighs the potential benefits.
DejanSEO We don’t know… Maybe. Full infographic on DejanSEO.com
There’s also a lot of room for error here. Just recently, Google Photos tagged black people as gorillas. It can also be a problem when models encounter unfamiliar situations or data. Without human oversight there are risks that the wrong action will be taken. Some people fear a catastrophe if machines are automating driving, flights, or even stock market trading, even though humans frequently cause catastrophes when in control of these things right now.
Machine learning could also lead us towards a robot economy, introducing efficiencies that put humans out of work. Will we be able to enjoy a utopic future free of toil or will the unemployed starve as the improvements are used to drive profits for the few ever higher? We may not live to worry about it if the wider AI movement driven by machine learning keeps improving and the singularity occurs. We can’t accurately predict what the machines will do when they become smarter than us. Hopefully, we aren’t staring down the barrel of a Skynet situation.
The right mix
That issue of how autonomous the machines are is at the heart of the machine learning movement. On your mobile Google suggests things and tries to predict, but generally stops short of automatically doing something. Human oversight is seen as desirable, even if we’d potentially get more benefit from machine learning if predictions were automatically applied. Like all good technology, machine learning could make our lives easier, but much depends on how it’s applied.
Get ready, 360-degree video ads are coming to YouTube
We knew these were well on their way, and the time has come. Google is ready to take YouTube video advertising to the next level by introducing support for 360-degree video ads.
This peculiar interactive videos were introduced to the most popular video streaming service in the world just last March. Since then, we have seen a plethora of content creators put together great ways to interact with their viewers. Multi-directional video takes advantage of the ability to drop the spectator right in the middle of the video, giving him a first-person perspective of any situation.
These 3D ads became available today in Chrome, as well as the Android and iOS YouTube apps. Whenever you encounter one of these commercials, simply drag the image with your cursor, or move your smartphone around to experience the content in a much more realistic manner.
Google has been testing this for some time with major brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, achieving amazing results. It turns out Coca-Cola’s 360-degree video on the 100th birthday of their bottle design achieved in stream view-through rates of 36%, which is very high compared to standard expectations.
Bud Light is now entering the game, becoming the first advertiser to run 360-degree TrueView video in YouTube. The ad throws you right into the party at Whatever, USA. Want to check it out? Here’s the video!
Those interested in making 360-degree video will need a Ricoh Theta, Kodak SP360, Giroptic 360cam or IC Real Tech Allie. Start creating your content with these cameras and follow Google’s steps to upload your videos. Then you can set up TrueView ads in AdWords.
Some believe YouTube has been going a bit too nuts with ads the past years. I can’t really argue against that. Advertising has never been too fun, but I, for one, will be more excited about seeing an interactive commercial like this one. Do you think it will be an annoyance to see much more complex 360-degree commercials before watching your favorite YouTube videos? Will it hurt or improve your experience? Let us know in the comments!
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