- Gabe Rives-Corbett, DFP API TeamEditor’s Note: The She Word is a Keyword series all about dynamic and creative women at Google. Now that Google Home Max has hit the shelves at Best Buy and Verizon, we sat down with Frances Kwee, an audio engineer who spends most of her time working on our smart speakers in a sound studio at the Googleplex.
As an acoustics engineer, I’m responsible for building audio systems that go into products like Google Home and Google Home Max.
Though we design our audio systems in special sound labs at Google, we recognize that we’re not selling speakers to operate in sound studios. They’re going into all types of living spaces, where the sounds will reverberate differently. So we created Smart Sound, which uses machine learning to adjust to whatever space the speaker is in. Since all homes are different, we trained our machine learning model to recognize thousands of different room configurations. This helps Google Home Max to adapt to the setup of your room: if you move it from your bookshelf against the wall to an end table across the room, it can evaluate its new surroundings and will automatically adjust.
With Max, one of our goals was to increase volume but limit distortion. Think about when you play music on your phone’s tiny speaker at top volume. It sounds raspy and muffled—not what you expect from a premium smart speaker.
So we used a computer program to simulate the speaker performance in dozens of scenarios, which helped us predict what the speaker would sound like before we built it. We also used a 3D printer to make prototypes to test out different buckets and grills. We ended up creating nearly 100 different 3D printed versions of Google Home Max before we landed on the final design!
As a mom, I ask myself, “How can more families benefit from our products?” I step back to think about the different ways a family would use a smart speaker.
We’re also trying to bring these products into homes of people who might be intimidated by technology, but we’re showing them that it’s easy to use. My parents have a Google Home—before I worked on the product, I never would have thought they’d be able to figure out how to use it. Now, they’re total pros.
Early in my career I worked on the 3G RAZR flip phone—my first foray into building smooth audio before anyone had smartphones. It was pretty revolutionary at the time, being able to put a decent sounding speaker into such a slim phone. In a way, it’s similar to Google Home Max. Though Max is big for a smart speaker, we packed in two 4.5-inch woofers that have 22mm of excursion, which means it can hit a wide range of low frequencies.
Choose to work on the really hard projects—they are risky, but entirely rewarding.
My mother immigrated on her own from Indonesia to Canada after high school. She got a chemical engineering degree in 1975, and was one of only two women in her class. She taught me how important it is to work your hardest and never quit.
Choose to work on the really hard projects—they are risky, but entirely rewarding. I once spent an entire year on a project that never made it out the door. It was a risk, but I don’t view it as a failure—the lessons I learned from that project set me up for success in building the smart speakers that I work on now.
I’m professionally trained in piano—I’ve been playing since I was four. And I used to play lead guitar in a cover band in Chicago. We played everything from Stevie Wonder to The Clash to Britney Spears, but my favorite song to perform was “What’s Love Got to Do with It” by Tina Turner.
Radiohead. Jonny Greenwood is a guitar god.
Being able to multitask but never lose focus on the big picture.
Based in Seattle, Big Fish Games was founded in 2002. Starting as a game studio, they quickly turned into a major publisher and distributor of casual games. Leading up to the launch of their hit time management game, Cooking Craze, the team ran an open beta on Google Play.
Big Fish Games found that using open beta provided more than 10x the amount of user feedback from around the world, and also gave them access to key metrics and Android Vitals in the Play Console. The ability to monitor game performance metrics pre-launch allowed the team to focus on areas of improvement, which lead to a 21% reduction in crash rate. The larger sample size of beta testers also provided more insights on player behavior and helped achieve a +7% improvement in day 1, day 7, and day 30 retention rates.
You can also learn more pre-launch best practices and strategies to improve performance post-launch at our Google Developer Day on Monday, March 19th at GDC. Sign up to stay informed.
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We’re teeing off a monthly series to help you keep up with G Suite news. Here’s what happened in January.
Organizations are constantly dealing with security incidents, but with the right tools, IT professionals can focus more on long-term prevention and less on tactical firefighting. This month, we announced the security center for G Suite to help.
The security center is a central place for IT administrators to see important security analytics, like usage, as well as insights to help them take action quicker, like if files are shared externally. It also shares best practices from Google on how to improve cyber-safety. G Suite enterprise customers can access a bird’s eye view of their organization’s security all from within the Admin console. Get started.
While we’re on the topic of security, enabling and encouraging second-factor (2SV) authentication can help protect your accounts if passwords are compromised. Learn how to easily enable 2SV and enforce its use across your organization.
Looking for more security tips? Here’s some guidance to help secure company information in the Admin console and these tips are handy for preventing phishing attempts.
→ Jamboard is a core service within G Suite. Welcome to the family!
→ Now you can use Hangouts Meet on Android and iOS tablets, and dial in from nine new countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Romania, Switzerland and Turkey. This brings the total to 24 countries where Meet is available, with more to come. Learn more.
→ We’ve made it easier to search for information within a specific folder in Google Drive. Now you can right click on a folder title in your Drive and select “Search within [title of folder].” Type terms into the search bar and track down your files faster. Here are some more tricks to help you save time searching.
→ Everyone should have a “say” in team collaboration, which is why we’re continuously improving our products to be more accessible. This month, we’ve added Braille support in Sheets and a way to magnify your screen in Slides. Check out a full list of accessibility features.
Until next time.
We’re teeing off a monthly series to help you keep up with G Suite news. Here’s what happened in January.
Organizations are constantly dealing with security incidents, but with the right tools, IT professionals can focus more on long-term prevention and less on tactical firefighting. This month, we announced the security center for G Suite to help.
The security center is a central place for IT administrators to see important security analytics, like usage, as well as insights to help them take action quicker, like if files are shared externally. It also shares best practices from Google on how to improve cyber-safety. G Suite enterprise customers can access a bird’s eye view of their organization’s security all from within the Admin console. Get started.
While we’re on the topic of security, enabling and encouraging second-factor (2SV) authentication can help protect your accounts if passwords are compromised. Learn how to easily enable 2SV and enforce its use across your organization.
Looking for more security tips? Here’s some guidance to help secure company information in the Admin console and these tips are handy for preventing phishing attempts.
→ Jamboard is a core service within G Suite. Welcome to the family!
→ Now you can use Hangouts Meet on Android and iOS tablets, and dial in from nine new countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Romania, Switzerland and Turkey. This brings the total to 24 countries where Meet is available, with more to come. Learn more.
→ We’ve made it easier to search for information within a specific folder in Google Drive. Now you can right click on a folder title in your Drive and select “Search within [title of folder].” Type terms into the search bar and track down your files faster. Here are some more tricks to help you save time searching.
→ Everyone should have a “say” in team collaboration, which is why we’re continuously improving our products to be more accessible. This month, we’ve added Braille support in Sheets and a way to magnify your screen in Slides. Check out a full list of accessibility features.
Until next time.
.query,.decrypt and .get as a set, custom roles make it possible to grant .get permission on its own. Since a custom role can also combine permissions from multiple GCP services, you can put all of the permissions for a service account in one place—and then share that new role across your entire organization.
“As the largest owner and operator of shopping centers in Australia and New Zealand, data security is crucial to our business. Google Cloud IAM custom roles help us meet our security standards, legislative requirements and remain compliant with the Australian Privacy Principles. With this feature, we can implement identity and access control to the authorized tasks performed by a specific person or machine, allowing us to fine-tune permissions and rigorously conform to the principle of least privilege.”
— Evgeny Minkevich, Integration Solution Architect, Scentre Group
