Editor’s Note: Talks at Google is our regular series that brings interesting speakers and brilliant minds from all industries and backgrounds to Google campuses. Each month, we select a few favorite talks from that month, or about a particular topic.
While the world spent the past couple of months watching the World Cup, we dug through our Talks at Google archive to find inspiration from athletes who have stopped by Google. Check out a few of our favorites: one athlete rides waves, another crushes miles, two play on a field, and the other does his toughest work off the court. And they all have stories to share.
Born and raised in Kauai, Bethany Hamilton lost her arm to a shark attack at age 13, but she didn’t let that stop her from riding the waves she’s surfed her whole life. After waiting a month to get the go-ahead to get in the water, she learned how to surf with one arm and she didn’t stop there. She founded a nonprofit, Friends of Bethany, to help young female amputees and is very passionate about working to help young girls. Bethany shared: "So many times in life we all go through different challenges and struggles. I've found in my life I've hugely relied on the things that I'm passionate about to kind of overcome and give me motivation and hope that there's a future beyond this momentary struggle and pain.”
Four-time Olympian and New York City marathon champion Shalane Flanagan, along with her college roommate and fellow runner Elyse Kopecky, have a lot of miles under their belts shoes. Over the course of their careers as runners, they’ve struggled to find a healthy, yet satisfying approach to fueling up for their runs. So together, they came up with the concept of “indulgent nourishment” (and wrote a cookbook about it), based on the idea that you don’t have to deprive yourself of the good stuff to stay healthy.
It’s been a while since David Beckham came to Google, but his perspective is just as interesting six years later. After discussing the future of soccer in the U.S, the music that gets him pumped before games, and how his family has factored into the biggest decisions of his career, Beckham answers questions from fans around the world.
“In doing the therapy process and going through the healing process, I was able to identify and recognize all these emotions as a man I never allowed myself to feel.” From NBA player to mental health activist, author, speaker and nonprofit founder, Keyon Dooling shares his inspiring personal experience with mental health and how he’s working to help others. He also gives insight into what the NBA is doing to support the mental health of its players.
Javagal Srinath was the fastest Indian bowler (for non-cricket experts, this is similar to a baseball pitcher, the person throwing the ball at the batter) of his time and inspired many by being one of the most successful Indian cricket players of all time in the world. When discussing his journey through the sport he talked about how he juggled getting his degree while playing the sport he loves. He shared advice given to him by an old mentor, “To think better in life is where education comes to your rescue and not for anything else … whatever you become in life you have to have education as the base.”
We think everyone should be able to express themselves online, so we want to make conversations more inclusive. That’s why we created tools like Perspective, an API that uses machine learning to detect abuse and harassment online. Perspective scores comments based on their similarity to other comments that others have marked as toxic.
However, sometimes the labels we use to describe ourselves and our loved ones can be used in a negative way to harass people online. And because machine learning models like the one used for Perspective are sensitive to the data sets on which they are trained, that means they might make the mistake of identifying sentences that use words like "gay," "lesbian" or "transgender" in positive ways as negative. (Within the ML community, we talk about this as insufficient diversity in the training data.)
That’s why we created Project Respect. We’re creating an open dataset that collects diverse statements from the LGBTIQ+ community, such as "I'm gay and I'm proud to be out” or “I’m a fit, happy lesbian that has just retired from a wonderful career” to help reclaim positive identity labels. These statements from the LGBTIQ+ community and their supporters will be made available in an open dataset, which coders, developers and technologists all over the world can use to help teach machine learning models how the LGBTIQ+ community speak about ourselves. The hope is that by expanding the diversity of training data, these models will be able to better parse what’s actually toxic and what’s not.
We launched the Project Respect site in March. But we need more input and help to make conversations more inclusive, so we’ve begun taking Project Respect on tour to Pride events around the world—starting in Sydney and Auckland before coming to San Francisco Pride last month. We'll continue to roll out in other parts of the world, meaning the data we gather will represent the LGBTIQ+ community on a global scale.
Googlers supporting Project Respect ahead of SF Pride this year
LGBTIQ+ individuals should feel safe and accepted wherever they are, both in the real world and online. That’s why efforts like Project Respect are important, and why we hope you’ll share your positive identity statement about yourself or the people you love in the LGBTIQ+ community. Share your statement at g.co/projectrespect to help make conversations more inclusive.
Posted by Zachary Senzer, Product Manager
A couple months ago at Google I/O, we announced a redesigned Actions console that makes developing your Actions easier than ever before. The new Actions console features a more seamless development experience that tailors your workflow from onboarding through deployment, with tailored analytics to manage your Actions post-launch. Simply select your use case during onboarding and the Actions console will guide you through the different stages of development.
Here are 5 tips to help you create the best Actions for your content using our new console.
Part of what makes the Actions on Google ecosystem so special is the vast array of devices that people can use to interact with your Actions. Some of these devices, including phones and our new smart displays, allow users to have rich visual interactions with your content. To help your Actions stand out, you can customize how these visual experiences appear to users of these devices. Simply visit the "Build" tab and go to theme customization in the Actions console where you can specify background images, typography, colors, and more for your Actions.
Conversational experiences can introduce complexity in how people ask to complete a task related to your Action--a user could ask for a game in thousands of different ways ("play a game for me", "find a maps quiz", "I want some trivia"). Figuring out all of the ways a user might ask for your Action is difficult. To make this process much easier, we're beginning to map the ways users might ask for your Action into a taxonomy of built-in intents to abstract away this difficulty.
We'll start to use the built-in intent you associated with your Action to help users more easily discover your content as we begin testing them with user's queries. We'll continue to add many more built-in intents over the coming months to cover a variety of use cases. In the Actions console, go to the "Build" tab, click "Actions", then "Add Action" and select one to get started.
While we'll continue to improve the ways users find your Actions within the Assistant, we've also made it easier for users to find your Actions outside the Assistant. Driving new traffic to your Actions is as easy as a click with Action Links. You now have the ability to define hyperlinks for each of your Actions to be used on your website, social media, email newsletters, and more. These links will launch users directly into your Action. If used on a desktop, the link will take users to the directory page for your Action, where they'll have the ability to choose the device they want to try your Action on. To configure Action Links in the console, visit the "Build" tab, choose "Actions", and select the Action for which you would like to create a link. That's it!
The best way to make sure that your Actions are working as intended is to test them using our updated web simulator. In the simulator, you can run through conversational user flows on phone, speaker, and even smart display device types. After you issue a request, you can see the visual response, request, and response JSON, with any potential errors. For further assistance with debugging errors, you also have the ability to view logs for your Actions.
Another great opportunity to test your Actions is by deploying to limited audiences in alpha and beta environments. By deploying to the alpha environment, your Actions do not need to go through the review process, meaning you can quickly test with your users. After deploying to the beta environment, you can launch your Actions to production whenever you like without additional review. To use alpha and beta environments, go to the "Deploy" tab and click "Release" in the Actions console.
After you deploy your Actions, it's equally important to measure their performance. By visiting the "Measure" tab and clicking "Analytics" in the Actions console, you will be able to view rich analytics on usage, health, and discovery. You can easily see how many people are using and returning to your Actions, how many errors users are encountering, the phrases users are saying to discover your Actions, and much, much, more. These insights can help you improve your Actions.
If you're new to the Actions console and looking for a quick way to get started, watch this video for an overview of the development process.
We're so excited to see how you will use the new Actions console to create even more Actions for more use cases, with additional tools to improve and iterate. Happy building!
In a polarized world, facts and data can provide valuable context for the debates swirling around us. And there has never been more data out there, with record numbers of data journalists working to make sense of it all. In fact, a study by the Google News Lab found that just over half of all newsrooms now have a dedicated data journalist.
One of the ways we seek to support data journalists through our Google News Initiative is to work to make data easier to discover, and we’re continuing this work with a new feature on Search.
Data journalism takes many forms, and it’s not always clear from the headline that there is potentially useful data within that document or story. The way that data is presented can vary as well, and though data tables are often the most useful format for data journalists, it isn’t always easy for Google Search to detect and understand tables of data to surface the most relevant results.
Based on feedback from 30 of the top data journalists in the world, we identified an opportunity to improve how tabular data appears in Google Search and in doing so make it easier for all people to find the data they’re looking for. It works like this: news organizations that publish data in the form of tables can add additional structured data to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant Search features. One of the participants, ProPublica has been testing the structured data on its interactive databases (for example, on its Non-profits Explorer).
News organizations add the structured data to their existing html of a page, which means that news organizations can still control how their tables are presented to readers.
“As a news organization that is focused on having real-world impact, it’s very much in our mission to give people information at the point of need. If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us. And the code is trivial to add.” - Scott Klein, Deputy Managing Editor, ProPublica
If you’re part of a news organization, check out our developer documentation.
Auto Trader UK is not only migrating from private cloud to public cloud, but also moving from virtual machines to Kubernetes. The level of control and visibility that Istio provides has enabled us to significantly de-risk this ambitious work, and in several cases has actually helped surface issues we were previously unaware of. We've been able to accelerate the delivery of capabilities such as mutual TLS, that previously would have taken significant engineering effort, allowing us to focus on our market differentiators.
- Karl Stoney, Delivery Infrastructure Lead, Auto Trader UK
“The growth of Istio since its launch last year has been tremendous, and it’s quickly taking its place as the standard way to manage microservices in the cloud,” said Jason McGee, IBM Fellow and VP, IBM Cloud. “Our mission since Istio’s launch has been to enable everyone to succeed with microservices, especially in the enterprise. This is why we’ve focused the community around improving security and scale, and heavily leaned our contributions on what we’ve learned from building agile cloud architectures for companies of all sizes.”
- Jason McGee, IBM Fellow and VP, IBM Cloud
"We see Istio's potential to be able to solve some of the most complex aspects of application development and deployment. It brings a control plane for service mesh, cluster orchestration, and network control that will support and enable developers to focus on the more important aspects of their application development. We are looking forward to leveraging Istio in Red Hat OpenShift to enable developers to deploy their applications in a more secure and efficient manner."
- Brian 'Redbeard' Harrington, product manager, Istio, Red Hat
“VMware has been an integral part of the community developing Istio service mesh. We see great potential in Istio’s service-based approach to connectivity, security, and observability. We believe it will become an infrastructure cornerstone, spanning across vSphere and Kubernetes platforms and multiple private and public clouds, and helping our enterprise customers improve development efficiencies and deliver on their SLAs / SLOs in a secure manner. Istio’s application layer complements the network virtualization layer, and together allow enterprises to achieve defense in depth, improve performance and scalability, and speed time to application value.”
- Pere Monclus, CTO Network and Security, VMware
git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/java-docs-samples.git
Starting today, you’ll be able to wake up to your favorite music on Spotify with the Google Clock app. Swap out the classic alarm sounds for your favorite pump-up song, a calming soundtrack or a mood-boosting melody.
To get started with musical alarms, make sure the latest versions of your Spotify and Clock apps are installed and connected on your device—this works for both Free and Premium Spotify users. Then choose your perfect wake up music. You can browse recently played music, choose from Spotify’s curated morning playlists, or search for a specific soundtrack.
Now when your musical alarm goes off, it will be a whole lot easier to get moving. After switching off your alarm, you’ll have the option to continue listening to Spotify throughout your day.
This feature will be rolling out globally this week on the Play Store, and will be available on all devices running Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and above.
Editor’s note: This article is a condensed version of a speech Caesar gave at Singapore’s Smart Nation Innovations Week Opening Symposium on June 5, 2018.
Humans have invented technology to help themselves and each other for centuries. While we often refer to technology as the shiny, new innovations like self-driving cars or voice assistants, its breadth is much more than that. Technology also includes the things that are so bound up in our daily lives that we have stopped thinking about them as technological innovations—things like language, clothes and shelter.
Despite technology’s pivotal role in human history, our response to breakthroughs is often to hesitate because we fear potential harm. But the world doesn’t stand still for anyone. As the past has shown, each of these technological breakthroughs presents another opportunity to improve people’s lives, and we need to embrace each of those opportunities.
Between 2000 and 2017, the number of internet users grew by 10X—from 360 million to 3.6 billion people. This massive migration online is causing an explosion of economic opportunity across the world.
Something as basic as an internet connection can mean the chance for a higher education, a new job or improved skills. In India for example, every month more than 8 million people use Google’s public Wi-Fi program, Google Station, to get online and access job training material or educational resources. Shrinath, a railway porter in Kerala, used the free, high-speed Wi-Fi at his public transit station to study for and eventually pass the entrance examinations to the Kerala civil service—a feat that would have been much more difficult if Shrinath hadn’t embraced the internet.
Caesar speaking at Smart Nation about the need to embrace new technologies
It’s also opening up opportunity for businesses big and small. With access to online platforms, companies have more ways to reach customers and grow. And every business can benefit from digital tools, even the most traditional ones. Hai Sia, a 40-year-old family-run seafood wholesaler in Singapore, for example, was a largely face-to-face business in a bustling fish market. Today, they’ve reached new customers with digital advertising and other digital tools like YouTube videos that show the company’s work.
Technology isn’t just about digitizing existing businesses—it’s also creating new kinds of entrepreneurs and industries. Look at YouTube creators, who run businesses that were born on an online platform and that could not have existed before the internet. GO-JEK, a startup that started as motorbike-hailing company in Indonesia, has facilitated the emergence of a new type of business with their food delivery service: allowing home cooks to become restaurateurs. Freed from the costly requirements of renting a restaurant space and hiring staff, people can run profitable businesses right from their kitchens at home.
Every major shift in technology has transformed how we live and work. In the early 1980s, the PC revolution made computers part of people’s lives and changed how we work. In the 1990s, the internet transformed how we find information and opened up new economic opportunity. Then, in the mid-2000s, smartphones brought all that knowledge into our pockets. Now AI is the next frontier.
What excites me most about the shift to AI and machine learning is watching what younger generations are doing with the technology. Teenagers are using AI to create programs that more accurately identify plant diseases and even detect breast cancer. If our kids can use technology to conserve the environment and fight cancer, imagine what we humans can do if they use AI as one tool among many to improve citizens’ lives.
As we continue to explore what benefits AI can bring, we need to lean into this shift rather than shy away from it. After all, the world would be a very different and much poorer place today if our ancestors had given up on fire or language or the wheel. The reaction to technology we don't know how to use well isn't to stop innovating. The right reaction is to work harder and innovate even better so we can make technology work for everyone.
