Google’s Chinese-to-English translations might now suck less

Mandarin Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to translate to English, and for those who rely on Google Translate to decipher important information, machine-based tools simply aren’t good enough. All that is about to change, as Google today announced it has implemented a new learning system in its web and mobile translation apps that will bring significantly better results.

As a native speaker (and reader and writer) of both Mandarin Chinese (both complex and traditional alphabets) and English, I’ve often cringed at Google Translate’s output. But looking at the examples provided by Google on its blog post, I am impressed. The new system uses what the company calls Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), which looks at entire sentences as it decodes instead of breaking them up into words and phrases to be considered independently. The latter method often resulted in disjointed results that sometimes didn’t make sense.

According to the company, this new technique is better, because “it requires fewer engineering design choices than previous Phrase-Based translation systems.” It still breaks up sentences into individual characters, but now considers each one in relation to those before and after it. This is especially important in a language such as Mandarin, wherein words can mean different things based on the characters they are paired with.

Chinese to English is just one of 10,000 language pairs that Google Translate supports, and the company says it will be working to roll out GNMT to more translations “over the coming months.” Of course, machine translation still isn’t perfect — there are plenty of nuances that algorithms simply can’t pick up on, regardless of how well neural-based artificial intelligence is doing. But at least now, with the new system, the meaning will hopefully be lost in translation, not lost in Translate.

Source: Google

Music labels sue YouTube ripping site over piracy

With the downfall of the Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents, users are turning to another way to get illegal songs: ripping YouTube streams. Record labels have taken note of the problem and sued the largest site, YouTube-mp3.org for $150,000 per violation. They say the site has up to 60 million users and and hosts tens or hundreds of millions of illegal downloads per month. “It should not be so easy to engage in this activity in the first place, and no stream ripping site should appear at the top of any search result or app chart,” says RIAA president Cary Sherman.

YouTube-mp3.org is one of many, many sites that let you download and keep high-quality video and audio files from YouTube. The problem is that while artists and labels get paid for YouTube plays (though not enough, they complain), there’s no money at all when users permanently download the files to a hard drive.

It should not be so easy to engage in this activity in the first place, and no stream ripping site should appear at the top of any search result or app chart.

The problem is so prevalent that you can now upload playlists from services like Spotify to YouTube, then rip all the songs from it in one go. On top of going after the ripping site, the music industry also fired a shot across the bow of Google and ISPs. “We hope that responsible advertisers, search engines and hosting providers will also reflect on the ethics of supporting sites that enrich themselves by defrauding creators,” said UK record label rep Geoff Taylor.

Via: BBC

Source: Music Business Worldwide

Google India debuts offline YouTube app, public WiFi expansion

At an event in New Delhi, India, Google laid out plans to better serve users in the country. These efforts broadly focus on two areas: data usage and language support.

The company highlighted the work it has done so far to reduce the need for high-speed data. Rahul Ro-Chowdhury, Google’s VP of Chrome, said Indian users save 337TB of data every week thanks to Chrome’s data saver feature. It’s recently updated data saver to also reduce the size of videos by as much as two thirds.

But the best way to save data, obviously, is to negate the need to use it at all. Features like Google Maps offline, now popular around the world, were tailor made for India and other developing markets. The new Chrome for Android update will offer the ability to download entire webpages, and a wide range of video and music files, for consumption offline.

Introducing YouTube Go: Maximise your fun without burning up data.
App coming soon, sign up now https://t.co/MzGTV0FzmC #GoogleForIndia pic.twitter.com/RMaB3HjT76

— Google India (@GoogleIndia) September 27, 2016

YouTube is one of the biggest bandwidth hogs across the world, and Google today announced an expansion of the video portal’s offline feature set for India. YouTube Go is a new app that allows users fine control of video downloads. The application offers a broad range of options for video quality and download time. It even allows for local sharing that won’t cost users a penny, via Bluetooth. It’s been designed to use as little data as possible, and also to work well in areas with unstable connections — downloads won’t fail if your connectivity drops; they’ll just pause until you get back online.

Google has been working hard to provide free internet access in the country. While Facebook has focused on zero-rating certain parts of the internet, Google has been offering WiFi in train stations. A Quartz report found that data speeds at these hotspots were among the best in the country — topping 40mbps in some cases. 1.5 million Indians had used the service across 19 stations by June, and Google has expanded its reach to a further 33 stations since.

Some 15,000 people are apparently using these hotspots to access the internet for the first time every day. With the initial pilot a success, Google is now announcing an expansion of the initiative, and renaming it “Google Station.”

“With Google Station, we aim to bring fast, affordable Wi-Fi to millions of people” – Caesar Sengupta at #GoogleForIndia pic.twitter.com/ElBvJoqFip

— Google India (@GoogleIndia) September 27, 2016

Despite the name, Station is set to expand the locations free WiFi is available beyond public transport buildings, as Google is looking to partner with private companies to offer solid WiFi elsewhere. The Verge explained that cafés, malls and other locations with heavy footfall will be able to work with Google to become part of the program. While some may make the hotspots free, Google will also offer the ability for businesses to monetize the hotspots, either through access fees or advertisements. Google is hoping to hit 100 locations by the end of the year through the initiative.

Google’s Play Store is also seeing a refresh designed to take advantage of free WiFi points. A new feature will use WiFi connections to pre-load the parts of the storefront that are most popular with other users. The pre-load will allow those on 2G connections to browse for new applications with fewer waits. Once a user decides on an application, they’ll be able to choose to delay the download until they connect to WiFi.

In addition to data saving tactics, Google’s VP of search John Giannandrea said the company is dedicated to enabling broad language support across India, highlighting that 12 of Google Translate’s supported languages are Indic. But while Allo and its Google Assistant are already available in the country, the company’s helpful AI currently only communicates in English. That’ll change by the end of year, as support for Hindi — the most-spoken Indic language — will arrive in the coming months.

Amit Fulay announces that #GoogleAllo was available first in India and, the Hindi Assistant is coming soon. #GoogleForIndia pic.twitter.com/qlUhk2TH3k

— Google India (@GoogleIndia) September 27, 2016

Choosing Hindi as the second language for its Assistant highlights the importance of India to Google. The country is likely to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation within the next decade. Unlike China, which is dominated by homegrown services, Google has managed to make solid inroads in India already. Caesar Sengupta, Google’s VP for the next billion users, leads a team based in Singapore that’s focused on delivering products and services to Southern and Southeast Asia.

While the focus at the New Delhi event was (obviously) India, many of the features announced will make their way to other countries in the region. “Every second three Indians come online and we have to ensure that the experience is wonderful and relevant for them,” Sengupta said, according to the Indian Express, “But the next billion is very different from the first billion, and by building products for these users, [we are] preparing for how the world will use tech in the coming years.”

Source: Indian Express, The Verge, Google India

Google’s Own Echo-Like Device ‘Google Home’ Rumored to Cost $130

Google will formally announced its Wi-Fi enabled smart home device, Google Home, at its upcoming October 4 press event, according to a new report by Android Police. The device is rumored to cost $129 and the company will sell different color plates so users can personalize the look of Home.

At $129, Google Home would be $50 cheaper than Amazon Echo, which offers a selection of similar services and features to users. Google originally discussed Home at its I/O Conference in May, detailing how users will be able to make voice-enabled Google searches, manage everyday tasks, enjoy music and entertainment, and more using hands-free “OK Google” voice commands.

Continuing in the vein of other smart home speakers, Home can play and control music, sync with various online services that provide traffic reports and weather forecasts, and interact with other smart home products like Nest. It’s believed that Google could use a version of its intelligent chat AI Google Assistant — which it uses in Allo — to fuel Home’s voice-control abilities.

The October 4 event is thought to be the launch pad of a few other Google products, including the $69 Chromecast Ultra (with 4K and HDR streaming), a new Daydream VR headset, and the company’s new lineup of Android phones.

The connected smart home speaker device is slowly becoming a popular platform following Amazon’s success with Echo and Echo Dot. Apple is rumored to be entering the space with a Siri-enabled alternative, which might have facial recognition but is otherwise thought to offer many of the same search inquiries, music listening, and voice assistant features of Echo and Home.

Recent reports have placed the device in prototype testing, which could mean it’s between six months and a year from making it to market, but because Apple hasn’t officially finalized any plans it “could still scrap the project.”

Tags: Google, Google Home
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Security writer recovers from massive revenge cyberattack

Journalists are no stranger to making enemies bent on retaliation. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to survive that retaliation in internet era… just ask security writer Brian Krebs. An unknown party knocked his website offline last week with a massive distributed denial of service attack (620Gbps of non-stop data) as revenge for exposing two major cyberattack sellers who’ve since been arrested. He’s only back online after taking advantage of Google’s Project Shield, which protects journalists against censorship-oriented denial of service campaigns. His previous anti-DDoS provider, Akamai, had little choice but to drop him — the company tells the Boston Globe that a sustained attack on that level would have cost the company “millions.”

The campaign might not have required an elaborate effort, either. Krebs believes that the attackers took advantage of a botnet made up of hacked Internet of Things devices like DVRs, home internet routers and security cameras, many of which have poor or even unchangeable passwords. A larger attack recently played havoc with a French web host using similar tactics. There’s also the chance that the culprits used spoofing, which magnifies attacks by tricking machines into sending reply messages to the victim.

To Krebs, the incident highlights the dangers to free speech in the modern era. It’s not just that it’s relatively trivial to mount a censorship campaign, it’s that the cost of defending yourself against that campaign can be prohibitive. One anti-DDoS service estimated that an Akamai-level defense would cost Krebs over $150,000 per year. How could any small-scale news outfit afford that kind of protection? A concerted effort to clamp down on device exploits and block spoofed traffic could be vital not just to improving basic internet security, but protecting freedom of expression. Countries with a penchant for censorship can easily use these data floods to silence critics, and they might just try so long as it’s easy.

Source: Krebs on Security, Boston Globe

Google internet balloon uses AI to stay in place for weeks

When Google first introduced Project Loon, its internet balloons used static algorithms to change altitude and stay in position. While clever, they were limited — Google couldn’t do much to adapt to unexpected weather patterns, which are quite common tens of thousands of feet in the air. Flash forward to today, however, and it’s a different story. The Project Loon team has revealed that it’s using artificial intelligence technology (specifically, machine learning) to alter balloons’ behavior and keep them in position for much longer. One test balloon stayed in the Peruvian stratosphere for 98 days, adapting to tricky wind conditions that might have sent it drifting away.

As Wired notes, the algorithms now comb over large amounts of data and learn from it. In one case, the balloon temporarily floated over the Pacific Ocean to catch winds when it determined that there wouldn’t be enough gusts to stay over land. There’s even “reinforcement learning,” which has the balloon refining its behavior even after making predictions as to what will happen. All told, the Peru vehicle made just under 20,000 tweaks to its altitude over the course of those 14 weeks, or dozens per day.

The AI-based upgrade should not only keep balloons in place for longer, but help Google trim costs and expand its reach. It won’t have to use quite as many balloons to blanket an area with aerial internet access — it can either scale back the size of the fleet or spread out over a wider area. Either way, the progress is good news for people who may soon depend on Project Loon to get internet access that would otherwise be out of reach.

Via: Wired

Source: Project Loon (Google+)