Category Archives: Google Developers Blog

News and insights on Google platforms, tools and events

Indie Games Accelerator – Applications open for class of 2019

Posted by Anuj Gulati, Developer Marketing Manager and Sami Kizilbash, Developer Relations Program Manager

Last year we announced the Indie Games Accelerator, a special edition of Launchpad Accelerator, to help top indie game developers from emerging markets achieve their full potential on Google Play. Our team of program mentors had an amazing time coaching some of the best gaming talent from India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. We’re very encouraged by the positive feedback we received for the program and are excited to bring it back in 2019.

Applications for the class of 2019 are now open, and we’re happy to announce that we are expanding the program to developers from select countries* in Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Successful participants will be invited to attend two gaming bootcamps, all-expenses-paid at the Google Asia-Pacific office in Singapore, where they will receive personalized mentorship from Google teams and industry experts. Additional benefits include Google hardware, invites to exclusive Google and industry events and more.

Find out more about the program and apply to be a part of it.

* The competition is open to developers from the following countries: Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

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Check out the Google Assistant talks at I/O 2019

Posted by Mary Chen, Strategy Lead, Actions on Google

This year at Google I/O, the Actions on Google team is sharing new ways developers of all types can use the Assistant to help users get things done. Whether you’re making Android apps, websites, web content, Actions, or IoT devices, you’ll see how the Assistant can help you engage with users in natural and conversational ways.

Tune in to our announcements during the developer keynote, and then dive deeper with our technical talks. We listed the talks out below by area of interest. Make sure to bookmark them and reserve your seat if you’re attending live, or check back for livestream details if you’re joining us online.


For anyone new to building for the Google Assistant


For Android app developers


For webmasters, web developers, and content creators


For smart home developers


For anyone building an Action from scratch


For insight and beyond


In addition to these sessions, stay tuned for interactive demos and codelabs that you can try at I/O and at home. Follow @ActionsOnGoogle for updates and highlights before, during, and after the festivities.

See you soon!

Advance your career with the Google Africa Certifications Scholarships

Posted by William Florance, Global Head, Developer Training Programs

Building upon our pledge to provide mobile developer training to 100,000 Africans to develop world class apps, today we are pleased to announce the next round of Google Africa Certification Scholarships aimed at helping developers become certified on Google’s Android, Web, and Cloud technologies.

This year, we are offering 30,000 additional scholarship opportunities and 1,000 grants for the Google Associate Android Developer, Mobile Web Specialist, and Associate Cloud Engineer certifications. The scholarship program will be delivered by our partners, Pluralsight and Andela, through an intensive learning curriculum designed to prepare motivated learners for entry-level and intermediate roles as software developers. Interested students in Africa can learn more about the Google Africa Certifications Scholarships and apply here

According to World Bank, Africa is on track to have the largest working-age population (1.1 billion) by 2034. Today’s announcement marks a transition from inspiring new developers to preparing them for the jobs of tomorrow. Google’s developer certifications are performance-based. They are developed around a job-task analysis which test learners for skills that employers expect developers to have.

As announced during Sundar Pichai - Google CEO’s visit to Nigeria in 2017, our continued initiatives focused on digital skills training, education and economic opportunity, and support for African developers and startups, demonstrate our commitment to help advance a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. By providing support for training and certifications we will help bridge the unemployment gap on the continent through increasing the number of employable software developers.

Although Google’s developer certifications are relatively new, we have already seen evidence that becoming certified can make a meaningful difference to developers and employers. Adaobi Frank - a graduate of the Associate Android Developer certification - got a better job that paid ten times more than her previous salary after completing her certification. Her interview was expedited as her employer was convinced that she was great for the role after she mentioned that she was certified. Now, she's got a job that helps provide for her family - see her video here. Through our efforts this year, we want to help many more developers like Ada and support the growth of startups and technology companies throughout Africa.

Follow this link to learn more about the scholarships and apply.

Updates from Coral: A new compiler and much more

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

Coral has been public for about a month now, and we’ve heard some great feedback about our products. As we evolve the Coral platform, we’re making our products easier to use and exposing more powerful tools for building devices with on-device AI.

Today, we're updating the Edge TPU model compiler to remove the restrictions around specific architectures, allowing you to submit any model architecture that you want. This greatly increases the variety of models that you can run on the Coral platform. Just be sure to review the TensorFlow ops supported on Edge TPU and model design requirements to take full advantage of the Edge TPU at runtime.

We're also releasing a new version of Mendel OS (3.0 Chef) for the Dev Board with a new board management tool called Mendel Development Tool (MDT).

To help with the developer workflow, our new C++ API works with the TensorFlow Lite C++ API so you can execute inferences on an Edge TPU. In addition, both the Python and C++ APIs now allow you to run multiple models in parallel, using multiple Edge TPU devices.

In addition to these updates, we’re adding new capabilities to Coral with the release of the Environmental Sensor Board. It’s an accessory board for the Coral Dev Platform (and Raspberry Pi) that brings sensor input to your models. It has integrated light, temperature, humidity, and barometric sensors, and the ability to add more sensors via it's four Grove connectors. The secure element on-board also allows for easy communication with the Google Cloud IOT Core.

The team has also been working with partners to help them evaluate whether Coral is the right fit for their products. We’re excited that Oivi has chosen us to be the base platform of their new handheld AI-camera. This product will help prevent blindness among diabetes patients by providing early, automated detection of diabetic retinopathy. Anders Eikenes, CEO of Oivi, says “Oivi is dedicated towards providing patient-centric eye care for everyone - including emerging markets. We were honoured to be selected by Google to participate in their Coral alpha program, and are looking forward to our continued cooperation. The Coral platform gives us the ability to run our screening ML models inside a handheld device; greatly expanding the access and ease of diabetic retinopathy screening.”

Finally, we’re expanding our distributor network to make it easier to get Coral boards into your hands around the world. This month, Seeed and NXP will begin to sell Coral products, in addition to Mouser.

We're excited to keep evolving the Coral platform, please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].

You can see the full release notes on Coral site.

Empowering Women Techmakers Around the World Through Localization

Posted by Marisa Pareti, on behalf of Women Techmakers

Women Techmakers creates visibility, community and resources for women in technology by hosting events, offering free training and piloting new initiatives with different groups and partners around the world. Earlier this year, we launched Women Techmakers in 60 Seconds, a YouTube series where we explain advanced technical topics in one minute or less.

Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with the GDS Global Localization Program to expand the accessibility and reach of our content. Together, our teams will work to create a diverse user experience by reducing language and cultural barriers. Localization goes beyond translation. While references in the US might not be popular concepts in other countries, our passionate partners ensure they sound natural to people around the world.

We’re proud to produce a series that reaches, inspires, and educates the Google Developer Community all over the world. Every other Wednesday, we’ll publish a new episode discussing topics like APIs, Virtual Machines, and more. In the comments below the video, we’ll include additional resources for you to explore if you want a deeper dive into the video’s theme. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. If you’re interested in learning more and getting involved with Women Techmakers, check out our website and sign up to become a member.

Update on the Google Groups Settings API

Posted by Zerzar Bukhari, Product Manager, G Suite

In February 2019, we announced upcoming changes to the Google Groups Settings API. Based on your feedback, we're making improvements to the Groups API to make it easier for you to assess the impact and take action. For the full list of changes, see this help center article.

When will API changes take effect?

The new features will be available starting March 25, 2019. It may take up to 72 hours for the features to rollout to everyone

What's changing?

  • Property 'membersCanPostAsTheGroup' will not be merged into 'whoCanModerateContent'
  • Property 'messageModerationLevel' will continue to support MODERATE_NEW_MEMBERS (it will not be deprecated)
  • New property 'customRoleUsedInMergedSetting'
    • This will indicate if a group uses custom roles in one of the merged settings. If a group uses a custom role, review the permissions in the Groups interface. The Groups API doesn't support custom roles and may report incorrect values for permissions.
  • New properties representing all to-be-merged settings, as well as the new settings, will be added
  • New property 'whoCanDiscoverGroup' to indicate the upcoming behavior for 'showInGroupDirectory'

For complete detail on Groups Settings API behavior changes, please reference this table.

This is the Future of Finance

Posted by Roy Glasberg, Head of Launchpad

Launchpad's mission is to accelerate innovation and to help startups build world-class technologies by leveraging the best of Google - its people, network, research, and technology.

In September 2018, the Launchpad team welcomed ten of the world's leading FinTech startups to join their accelerator program, helping them fast-track their application of advanced technology. Today, March 15th, we will see this cohort graduate from the program at the Launchpad team's inaugural event - The Future of Finance - a global discussion on the impact of applied ML/AI on the finance industry. These startups are ensuring that everyone has relevant insights at their fingertips and that all people, no matter where they are, have access to equitable money, banking, loans, and marketplaces.

Tune into the event from wherever you are via the livestream link

The Graduating Class of Launchpad FinTech Accelerator San Francisco'19

  • Alchemy (USA), bridging blockchain and the real world
  • Axinan (Singapore), providing smart insurance for the digital economy
  • Aye Finance (India), transforming financing in India
  • Celo (USA), increasing financial inclusion through a mobile-first cryptocurrency
  • Frontier Car Group (Germany), investing in the transformation of used-car marketplaces
  • GO-JEK (Indonesia), improving the welfare and livelihoods of informal sectors
  • GuiaBolso (Brazil), improving the financial lives of Brazilians
  • JUMO (South Africa), creating a transparent, fair money marketplace for mobile users to access loans
  • m.Paani (India), (em)powering local retailers and the next billion users in India
  • Starling Bank (UK), improving financial health with a 100% mobile-only bank

Since joining the accelerator, these startups have made great strides and are going from strength to strength. Some recent announcements from this cohort include:

  • JUMO have announced the launch of Opportunity Co, a 500M fund for credit where all the profits go back to the customers.
  • The team at Aye Finance have just closed $30m in Series D equity round.
  • Starling Bank has provided 150 new jobs in Southampton and have received a £100m grant from a fund aimed at increasing competition and innovation in the British banking sector, and also a £75m fundraise.
  • GuiaBolso ran a campaign to pay the bills of some its users (the beginning of the year in Brazil is a time of high expenses and debts) and is having a significant impact on credit with 80% of cases seeing interest rates on loans being cheaper than traditional banks.

We look forward to following the success of all our participating founders as they continue to make a significant impact on the global economy.

Want to know more about the Launchpad Accelerator? Visit our site, stay updated on developments and future opportunities by subscribing to the Google Developers newsletter and visit The Launchpad Blog.

Launchpad Accelerator announces startup selections in Africa, Brazil, and India

Posted by Roy Glasberg, Founder of Launchpad Accelerator

For the past six years, Launchpad has connected startups from around the world with the best of Google - its people, network, methodologies, and technologies. We have worked with market leaders in over 40 countries across 6 regional programs (San Francisco, Brazil, Africa, Israel, India, and Tokyo). Launchpad also includes a new program in Mexico announced earlier this year, along with our Indie Games Accelerator and Google.org AI for Social Good Accelerator programs.

We are pleased to announce that the next cohort of startups has been selected for our upcoming programs in Africa, Brazil, and India. We reviewed over 1,000 applications for these programs, and were thoroughly impressed with the quality of startups that indicated their interest. The startups chosen represent those using technology to create a positive impact on key industries in their region and we look forward to supporting them and connecting them with startup ecosystems around the world.

In Africa, we have selected 12 startups from 6 African countries for our 3rd class in this region:

  • 54Gene (Nigeria) - Improving drug discovery by researching the genetically diverse African population
  • Data Integrated Limited (Kenya) - Automating and digitizing SME payments, connecting the street to high finance.
  • Instadiet.me (Egypt) - Connecting patients to credible nutritionists and dietitians to help them maintain a healthy and optimal weight online.
  • Kwara (Kenya) - Providing a rich digital banking platform to established fair lenders such as credit unions or savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs), with an open API to enable and accelerate their inclusion into the formal financial ecosystem.
  • OkHi (Kenya) - A physical addressing platform for emerging markets - on a mission to enable the billions without a physical address to "be included."
  • PAPS (Senegal) - Logistics startup focused on last mile delivery and domestic market, with strong client care orientation, allowing live tracking, intelligent adresses system and automatic dispatch.
  • ScholarX (Nigeria) - Connecting high potential students with funding opportunities to help them access an education
  • Swipe2pay (Uganda) - A web and mobile payments solution that democratizes electronic payments for SMEs by making it easy for them to accept mobile as a mode of payment.
  • Tambua Health Inc. (Kenya) - Turning a normal smartphone into a powerful, non-invasive diagnostic tool for Tuberculosis and Pneumonia. It uses a cough sound acoustic signature, symptoms, risk factors, and clinical information to come up with a diagnostic report.
  • Voyc.ai (South Africa) - A CX Research Platform that helps companies understand their customers by turning their customer research into insights, profiles, and customer journey maps.
  • WellaHealth (Nigeria) - A pharmacy marketplace for affordable, high-quality disease care driven by artificial intelligence starting with malaria.
  • Zelda Learning (South Africa) - Providing free online career guidance for students looking to enter university and linking them to funding and study opportunities.

In India, for our 2nd class, we are focused on seed to growth-stage startups that operate across a number of sectors using ML and AI to solve for India-specific problems:

  • Opentalk Pte Ltd - an app that connects people around the world to become better speakers and make new friends.
  • THB - Helping healthcare providers drive full potential value from their clinical data
  • Perceptiviti Data Solutions - An AI platform for Insurance claim Ffagging, payment integrity, fraud, and abuse management
  • DheeYantra - Cognitive conversational AI for Indian vernacular languages
  • Kaleidofin - Customized financial solutions that combine multiple financial products such as savings, credit, and insurance in intuitive ways to help customers achieve their financial goals.
  • FinancePeer - A P2P lending company that connects lenders with borrowers online.
  • SmartCoin - A go-to app for providing credit access to the vastly underserved lower- and middle-income segments through advanced AI/ML models.
  • HRBOT - Using AI and Video Analytics to find employable candidates in tier 2 & 3 cities remotely.
  • Savera.ai - Remotely mapping roofs to reflect the attractiveness of a solar power plant for your roof, followed by chatbot based support to help you learn about solar (savings, RoI, reviews etc.) and connections to local service providers.
  • Adiuvo Diagnostics - Rapid wound infection assessment and management device.

In Brazil, we have chosen startups that are applying ML in interesting ways and are solving for local challenges.

  • Accountfy - SaaS platform focused on FP&A tools. Users upload trial balances and financial statements are easily built through accounting figures. harts, alerts, reports and budgets can be created too.
  • Agilize - An online accounting firm that provides annual savings of $1,500, predictability, and transparency to small-sized business through a friendly platform and massive automation.
  • Blu365 - An innovative, data-driven, customer-centric debt negotiation platform that has been transforming positively the relationship between companies and customers .
  • Estante Mágica - Estante Mágica is a free platform that, in partnership with schools, turn students into real authors, making children protagonists of their own stories.
  • Gesto - GESTO is a health tech consulting firm that uses data science to intelligently manage health insurance.
  • Rebel -A data, tech, and analytics-driven platform whose mission is to lead the transformation of the financial services market in Brazil by empowering consumers.
  • SmarttBot - Empowering individuals with the best automated investment tools in order to give them edge against bigger investors and financial institutions and improve their chances of making money.
  • Social Miner - A technology able to predict if an e-commerce visitor will buy or not and create experiences based on the consumer journey phases.

Applications are still open for Launchpad Accelerator Mexico - if you are a LATAM-based startup using technology to solve big challenges for that region, please apply to the program here

As with all of our previous regional classes, these startups will benefit from customized programs, access to partners and mentors on the ground, and Google's support and dedication to their success.


Stay updated on developments and future opportunities by subscribing to the Google Developers newsletter, as well as The Launchpad Blog.

Introducing Coral: Our platform for development with local AI

Posted by Billy Rutledge (Director) and Vikram Tank (Product Mgr), Coral Team

AI can be beneficial for everyone, especially when we all explore, learn, and build together. To that end, Google's been developing tools like TensorFlow and AutoML to ensure that everyone has access to build with AI. Today, we're expanding the ways that people can build out their ideas and products by introducing Coral into public beta.

Coral is a platform for building intelligent devices with local AI.

Coral offers a complete local AI toolkit that makes it easy to grow your ideas from prototype to production. It includes hardware components, software tools, and content that help you create, train and run neural networks (NNs) locally, on your device. Because we focus on accelerating NN's locally, our products offer speedy neural network performance and increased privacy — all in power-efficient packages. To help you bring your ideas to market, Coral components are designed for fast prototyping and easy scaling to production lines.

Our first hardware components feature the new Edge TPU, a small ASIC designed by Google that provides high-performance ML inferencing for low-power devices. For example, it can execute state-of-the-art mobile vision models such as MobileNet V2 at 100+ fps, in a power efficient manner.

Coral Camera Module, Dev Board and USB Accelerator

For new product development, the Coral Dev Board is a fully integrated system designed as a system on module (SoM) attached to a carrier board. The SoM brings the powerful NXP iMX8M SoC together with our Edge TPU coprocessor (as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RAM, and eMMC memory). To make prototyping computer vision applications easier, we also offer a Camera that connects to the Dev Board over a MIPI interface.

To add the Edge TPU to an existing design, the Coral USB Accelerator allows for easy integration into any Linux system (including Raspberry Pi boards) over USB 2.0 and 3.0. PCIe versions are coming soon, and will snap into M.2 or mini-PCIe expansion slots.

When you're ready to scale to production we offer the SOM from the Dev Board and PCIe versions of the Accelerator for volume purchase. To further support your integrations, we'll be releasing the baseboard schematics for those who want to build custom carrier boards.

Our software tools are based around TensorFlow and TensorFlow Lite. TF Lite models must be quantized and then compiled with our toolchain to run directly on the Edge TPU. To help get you started, we're sharing over a dozen pre-trained, pre-compiled models that work with Coral boards out of the box, as well as software tools to let you re-train them.

For those building connected devices with Coral, our products can be used with Google Cloud IoT. Google Cloud IoT combines cloud services with an on-device software stack to allow for managed edge computing with machine learning capabilities.

Coral products are available today, along with product documentation, datasheets and sample code at g.co/coral. We hope you try our products during this public beta, and look forward to sharing more with you at our official launch.

.dev for all

Posted by Adam Seligman, VP, Developer Relations

Last week we announced the new .dev top-level domain (TLD) was open for Early Access registrations. As of today, .dev is available to anyone through your registrar of choice (typically $12-$15 for standard priced domains, varies by registrar).

We envision .dev as a home for developers. From tools to programming languages to blogs, .dev is the best place for all the amazing things that you build. Over the past few months, we've launched, or re-launched, many of our own developer sites on the new domain. Here are some of our favorites:

  • Learn how to build a better web at web.dev.
  • Start your open source journey with the right license. Did you know that without the right license, software isn't really open source? Opensource.dev explains why.
  • Learn how to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase. Visit flutter.dev to learn more.
  • Join the TensorFlow community at tfhub.dev.
  • Analyze and tune your software with performance tracing for Android, Linux, and Chrome. Check out perfetto.dev.
  • Explore Google's open source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine at v8.dev
  • Get your hands on Puppeteer, a Node library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. Get it at pptr.dev.

But we're not done yet! We've got big plans for .dev, and we'd like to invite you to join us. To start, everyone who applied for a ticket to Google I/O 2019 will get a .dev domain at no cost for one year. If you entered the drawing, check your inbox for your redemption code. We'll be moving more of our existing projects and launching some exciting things on .dev in the months to come. We can't wait to see what you build on .dev -- share what you create with #hellodotdev.