Directly open Office editing from shared links

 

Quick launch summary 

Now, when you create links to shared Microsoft Office files stored in Drive, they will open directly in Google Docs, Sheets or Slides. Previously, Office files would open in a preview mode first — this streamlined experience allows you to begin editing and collaborating on these files faster. 

This change also updates the alternateLink and webViewLink fields for shared links in the Google Drive API. 


               Office files opening without preview                                                 
Getting started 


Rollout pace 

Availability 
  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers 
Resources 

Express yourself and connect with others on Chromebooks

Many people this past year used Chromebooks to keep in touch with family and friends, stay entertained and work or learn from home. Today, we’re introducing a few new features that make connecting and communicating with others — on video chat or through text — even easier.

Improved video calls on your Chromebook

With more people now relying on video calls, we’ve improved the experience to help make sure you’ll have smooth conversations on any Chromebook and your favorite app. 

With Chrome OS’s latest update, Google Meet will be pre-installed on all Chromebooks, so it’s easy to launch into the app and get on a video call right from the Launcher. Google Meet includes exciting features, like video backgrounds, that make meetings more inclusive and fun. We’ve also made performance improvements like adapting video calls to different network conditions and adjusting video performance during screen sharing.  

Screen showing a five-person video call in progress on Google Meet.

 The new Google Meet app on Chromebook

Recently we partnered with Zoom to launch an improved version of the app for Chromebooks on the Google Play Store. This new version delivers faster performance, takes up less storage and includes latest features such as breakout rooms, live transcription and a new background masking feature for privacy. 

Plus, you can find other apps for video calling to suit your specific needs. For example, you can connect with teams remotely on Jitsi-Meet or hang out with friends and family on Houseparty. And to make your video calls even better, you can add Works With Chromebook certified accessories to your setup, including web cameras and headsets from partners like Logitech, EPOS and Lenovo.

Express yourself with emoji  ?  

Earlier this month, Google celebrated World Emoji Day by announcing more shareable and inclusive emoji. Now we’ve made it even easier to express yourself with emoji on Chromebooks with a new shortcut and emoji picker.

On your Chromebook, use the new keyboard shortcut (Search or Launcher key + Shift + Space) to bring up the compact emoji picker. From there, you can see your recently used emoji and scroll to discover others. With a click, the perfect emoji is inserted into a conversation, document, or any text field on your Chromebook. 

We’ve also made it easier to search for an emoji (currently only available in English) and view related options. Setting up a calendar invitation for coffee? Open the picker, type “coffee,” then select the emoji you want. ☕️  ?

The emoji picker is pulled up and shows recently used emoji, the search bar and a scrollable list of emoji to choose from.

Search for emoji then add them to text fields with Chromebook’s new emoji picker.

Keep in touch – from anywhere

Chrome OS now supports eSIM for cellular connectivity. With eSIM, you can download and switch between carrier profiles without having to insert or remove a physical SIM card from your laptop. This will be particularly helpful if you need to connect to a cellular network but can’t run to the store for a SIM card, and for international travelers who frequently switch between networks.

This feature is only available on eSIM-compatible Chromebooks, like the Acer Chromebook Spin 513 and Acer Chromebook 511. To get started on these devices, go to Settings, then "Mobile data" in the "Network" section, and add a connection.

A dialog box prompts a user to take a picture of a QR Code during network setup.

You can use a QR Code to help set up the new cellular network on your Chromebook.

Celebrate togetherness

This month we’re also introducing a new collection of wallpapers from three Black artists, Aurelia Durand, Sabrena Khadija and Meech Boakye. Each artist created wallpapers inspired by the concept of togetherness. Their lively designs reflect connections between family and friends, empowering and uplifting one’s community, and the experience of being in nature. 

To try them out, just right-click your desktop and choose “Set wallpaper,” then select “Togetherness.”

Discover new ways to create and play on your Chromebook

For parents looking to keep their kids entertained and engaged, the Explore app on Chromebooks now includes a digital magazine curated for kids and families. Each issue will be packed with educational apps to help kids discover new ways to create and play on their Chromebooks.

 The first issue focuses on game design, and in addition to suggesting apps to help kids learn how to design and code their own games, it also features an interview with game creator Jesse Schell. Keep an eye out for future updates with more expert interviews and other themes to inspire kids’ creativity.

This digital magazine is currently only available for Family Link users in the United States. Find it in the Explore app, under “Discover.”

A GIF scrolls through the new issue titled “Explore game design on your Chromebook”. It shows a round up of educational apps and games, and has a video with came creator Jesse Schell.

The digital magazine exclusive to Chromebook within the Explore app

We’ll be back soon to share more new Chromebook features. ? 

Google Summer of Code 2021: Mentor Stats

The global, online program, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2021, kicked off in May when 1,289 student developers were paired with mentors from 199 open source organizations to work on a programming project for 10 weeks.

This year we have 2,143 mentors assigned to student projects. Our mentors represent 75 countries from around the world and are a mix of past GSoC students, former Google Code-in mentors, long-time mentors and of course, new mentors.

Google Summer of Code logo

Here are more mentor statistics to check out.

Top 10 countries with the most mentors in 2021 are:

Country

Mentors

United States

554

India

302

Germany

185

United Kingdom

152

France

93

Spain

72

Switzerland

62

Canada

61

Russian Federation

49

Australia

45

  • Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 80 (4%)
  • Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 211 (10%)
  • Mentors that are former GSoC students: 530 (25%)
  • Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 343 (16%)
  • First time GSoC mentors: 294 (14%)
Before coding began, students and mentors were introduced during the community bonding period. Together they spent a month planning their projects and milestones while students also learned about their mentor organization. During the program students gain real world experience, make connections in their newfound community, and create code that is beneficial to all. After the program ends some students decide to become mentors themselves or continue to contribute to their GSoC organization, while some blaze their own open source path. By sharing their experiences and know-how with their students, our awesome mentors represent the many possibilities within open source and in turn, continue to help build a healthy, diverse open source community.

A big ‘thank you’ to all our dedicated and enthusiastic GSoC mentors who continue to inspire our students year after year!

By Romina Vicente, Project Coordinator for the Google Open Source Programs Office

Google at ACL 2021

This week, the 59th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), a premier conference covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language, is taking place online.

As a leader in natural language processing and understanding, and a Diamond Level sponsor of ACL 2021, Google will showcase the latest research in the field with over 35 publications, and the organization of and participation in a variety of workshops and tutorials.

If you’re registered for ACL 2021, we hope that you’ll visit the Google virtual booth in Gather Town to learn more about the projects and opportunities at Google that go into solving interesting problems for billions of people. You can also learn more about Google's participation on the ACL 2021 Expo page, and see a full list of Google publications below (Google affiliations in bold).

Organizing Committee
Senior Area Chairs include: Dan Roth, Emily Pitler, Jimmy Lin, Ming-Wei Chang, Sebastian Ruder, Slav Petrov
Area Chairs include: Ankur P. Parikh, Artem Sokolov, Bhuwan Dhingra, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Colin Cherry, Dani Yogatama, David Mimno, Hideto Kazawa, Ian Tenney, Jasmijn Bastings, Jun Suzuki, Katja Filippova, Kyle Gorma, Lu Wang, Manaal Faruqui, Natalie Schluter, Peter Liu, Radu Soricut, Sebastian Gehrmann, Shashi Narayan, Tal Linzen, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Waleed Ammar

Publications
Parameter-Efficient Multi-task Fine-Tuning for Transformers via Shared Hypernetwork
Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi*, Sebastian Ruder, Mostafa Dehghani, James Henderson

TicketTalk: Toward Human-Level Performance with End-to-End, Transaction-Based Dialog Systems
Bill Byrne, Karthik Krishnamoorthi, Saravanan Ganesh, Mihir Sanjay Kale

Increasing Faithfulness in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue with Controllable Feature
Hannah Rashkin, David Reitter, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Dipanjan Das

Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?
Peter Shaw, Ming-Wei Chang, Panupong Pasupat, Kristina Toutanova

Exploiting Language Relatedness for Low Web-Resource Language Model Adaptation: An Indic Languages Study
Yash Khemchandani, Sarvesh Mehtani, Vaidehi Patil, Abhijeet Awasthi, Partha Talukdar, Sunita Sarawagi

Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Mechanisms in Neural Language Model
Matthew Finlayson, Aaron Mueller, Sebastian Gehrmann, Stuart Shieber, Tal Linzen*, Yonatan Belinkov

Modeling Fine-Grained Entity Types with Box Embeddings
Yasumasa Onoe, Michael Boratko, Andrew McCallum, Greg Durrett

TextSETTR: Few-Shot Text Style Extraction and Tunable Targeted Restyling
Parker Riley*, Noah Constant, Mandy Guo, Girish Kumar*, David Uthus, Zarana Parekh

Which Linguist Invented the Lightbulb? Presupposition Verification for Question-Answering
Najoung Kim*, Ellie Pavlick, Burcu Karagol Ayan, Deepak Ramachandran

H-Transformer-1D: Fast One-Dimensional Hierarchical Attention for Sequences
Zhenhai Zhu, Radu Soricut

Are Pretrained Convolutions Better than Pretrained Transformers?
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Jai Gupta, Dara Bahri, Vamsi Aribandi, Zhen Qin, Donald Metzler

Benchmarking Scalable Methods for Streaming Cross Document Entity Coreference
Robert L Logan IV, Andrew McCallum, Sameer Singh, Dan Bikel

PhotoChat: A Human-Human Dialogue Dataset With Photo Sharing Behavior For Joint Image-Text Modeling
Xiaoxue Zang, Lijuan Liu, Maria Wang, Yang Song*, Hao Zhang, Jindong Chen

Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization
Rahul Aralikatte*, Shashi Narayan, Joshua Maynez, Sascha Rothe, Ryan McDonald*

A Cognitive Regularizer for Language Modeling
Jason Wei, Clara Meister, Ryan Cotterell

Language Model Augmented Relevance Score
Ruibo Liu, Jason Wei, Soroush Vosoughi

Cross-Replication Reliability - An Empirical Approach to Interpreting Inter-rater Reliability
Ka Wong, Praveen Paritosh, Lora Aroyo

TIMEDIAL: Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in Dialog
Lianhui Qin*, Aditya Gupta, Shyam Upadhyay, Luheng He, Yejin Choi, Manaal Faruqui

StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling
Yikang Shen*, Yi Tay, Che Zheng, Dara Bahri, Donald Metzler, Aaron Courville

MOLEMAN: Mention-Only Linking of Entities with a Mention Annotation Network
Nicholas FitzGerald, Jan A. Botha, Daniel Gillick, Daniel M. Bikel, Tom Kwiatkowski, Andrew McCallum

Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation
Yinfei Yanga, Ning Jinb, Kuo Linb, Mandy Guoa, Daniel Cera

ROPE: Reading Order Equivariant Positional Encoding for Graph-Based Document Information Extraction
Chen-Yu Lee, Chun-Liang Li, Chu Wang∗, Renshen Wang, Yasuhisa Fujii, Siyang Qin, Ashok Popat, Tomas Pfister

Measuring and Improving BERT’s Mathematical Abilities by Predicting the Order of Reasoning
Piotr Piekos, Henryk Michalewski, Mateusz Malinowsk

Improving Compositional Generalization in Classification Tasks via Structure Annotations
Juyong Kim, Pradeep Ravikumar, Joshua Ainslie, Santiago Ontañón

A Simple Recipe for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction
Sascha Rothe, Jonathan Mallinson, Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, Aliaksei Severyn

nmT5 - Is Parallel Data Still Relevant for Pre-training Massively Multilingual Language Models?
Mihir Kale, Aditya Siddhant, Noah Constant, Melvin Johnson, Rami Al-Rfou, Linting Xue

QA-Driven Zero-Shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining
Xinya Du*, Luheng He, Qi Li, Dian Yu*, Panupong Pasupat, Yuan Zhang

AgreeSum: Agreement-Oriented Multi-Document Summarization
Richard Yuanzhe Pang*, Adam D. Lelkes, Vinh Q. Tran, Cong Yu

Disfl-QA: A Benchmark Dataset for Understanding Disfluencies in Question Answering
Aditya Gupta, Jiacheng Xu*, Shyam Upadhyay, Diyi Yang, Manaal Faruqui

Training ELECTRA Augmented with Multi-word Selection
Jiaming Shen*, Jialu Liu, Tianqi Liu, Cong Yu, Jiawei Han

A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP
Steven Y. Feng, Varun Gangal, Jason Wei, Sarath Chandar, Soroush Vosoughi, Teruko Mitamura, Eduard Hovy

RealFormer: Transformer Likes Residual Attention
Ruining He, Anirudh Ravula, Bhargav Kanagal, Joshua Ainslie

Scaling Within Document Coreference to Long Texts
Raghuveer Thirukovalluru, Nicholas Monath, Kumar Shridhar, Manzil Zaheer, Mrinmaya Sachan, Andrew McCallum

MergeDistill: Merging Language Models using Pre-trained Distillation
Simran Khanuja, Melvin Johnson, Partha Talukdar

DoT: An Efficient Double Transformer for NLP tasks with Tables
Syrine Krichene, Thomas Müller*, Julian Martin Eisenschlos

How Reliable are Model Diagnostics?
Vamsi Aribandi, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler

Workshops
Interactive Learning for Natural Language Processing
Organizers include: Filip Radlinski
Invited Panelist: Julia Kreutzer

6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)
Organizers include: Chris Dyer, Laura Rimell

Third Workshop on Gender Bias for Natural Language Processing
Organizers include: Kellie Webster

Benchmarking: Past, Present and Future
Invited Speaker: Eunsol Choi

SemEval-2021, 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Organizers include: Natalie Schluter

Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms
Organizers include: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran

GEM: Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics
Organizers include: Sebastian Gehrmann

Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Programming
Invited Speaker: Charles Sutton

WPT 2021: The 17th International Conference on Parsing Technologies
Organizers include: Weiwei Sun

Tutorial
Recognizing Multimodal Entailment
Instructors include: Cesar Ilharco, Vaiva Imbrasaite, Ricardo Marino, Jannis Bulian, Chen Sun, Afsaneh Shirazi, Lucas Smaira, Cordelia Schmid


*  Work conducted while at Google. 

Source: Google AI Blog


Cheer on the finalists of our Indie Games Festival

On September 4, we’re celebrating some of the best indie talent on Google Play during the Indie Games Festival finals for Europe, Japan and South Korea. This year the three festivals are virtual, so you can join us to discover the games, meet the developers who created them, cheer them on and be the first to hear who the winners are. 


In June we kicked off the Indie Games Festival – a competition to celebrate the innovation and creativity that indie developers bring to Google Play. We received thousands of submissions, showing our judges how unique and diverse our games developer community is. 


The panel of judges have now selected 20 games in each region – listed below – to go forward to the finals on September 4. Each finalist receives exclusive promotions and prizes that give their games the recognition they deserve. 


So, don’t miss out. Expect plenty of fun and some very special surprises. Sign up now to virtually attend the festivals for Europe, Japan and South Korea. The events are free to attend and will all take place in the same space, so sign up to one and you will be able to teleport to all events!  

Blobby, the Indie Games Festival mascot, is standing up on a stage with a microphone to announce the finalists of the Europe competition. All finalist icons are on the banner.

Europe


Beat Workers by NaturalPad Games, France

Bird Alone by George Batchelor, United Kingdom

Cats in Time by Pine Studio, Croatia

Figment by Bedtime Digital Games, Denmark

Froglike: The Frog Roguelike by Jimjum Studios, Israel

Garson by Anastasiya Shabunia, Belarus

Gumslinger by Itatake, Sweden

Lyxo by Emoak, Austria

Psychofunk by Tommy Søreide Kjær, Norway

Railways by Infinity Games, Portugal

Sticky Terms by kamibox, Germany

Sweet Sins Superstars by Platonic Games, Spain

Tiny Robots Recharged by Big Loop Studios, Bulgaria

Tofu Drifter by Roach Games, Russia

Towers by JOX Development, Ukraine

Unholy Adventure by Dali Games, Poland

Warplane Inc by Nuclear Games, Russia

Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown by Ultaan Games, Poland

Woof: The Good Boy Story by CHPV.GAMES, Russia

Zen Symmetry by 8tbl, Russia


Sign up to attend the European finals.
Blobby, the Indie Games Festival mascot, is standing up on a stage with a microphone to announce the finalists of the Japan competition. All finalist icons are on the banner.

Japan


3D Chess: NOCCA NOCCA by Curiouspark, Inc.

5colors in Nate by NekodoraSoft

Amabie san by HARAPECORPORATION Inc.

Archer Battle Online by Takuya Fujieda

Cthulhu DreamStairs by Tenyu

ElectriarCode by ELECTRIAR LABO / Blue

Escape from the Closed Circle by Hanachiru

Heart  of Sengoku by ZEN APP

Leaving Two Tiles Dojo by ScreenPocket

Living in the Ending World by illuCalab.

MAKOTO WAKAIDO’s Case Files “Executioner’s Wedge” by HafHaf-Oden (Sukashiuma-LAB)

Mini Mini Farm by CoffeeBreak

MonohakobiPro by CGO

Mousebusters by Odencat

Numpurr Card Wars by Nukenin

Parasite Days by Zxima

Quantum Transport by ruccho

Super Glitter Rush by tiny cactus studio

Survivor's guilt by aso

Wolf Chess by baton inc.


Sign up to attend the Japanese finals.
Blobby, the Indie Games Festival mascot, is standing up on a stage with a microphone to announce the finalists of the South Korea competition. All finalist logos are on the banner.

South Korea


Angel Saga by Alchemist Games Inc.

Animal Card Royale by Banjihagames

Animal Doll Shop by Funnyeve

BattleLive: Zombie&Human by PLOTRICK

Box It Up! Inc. by team TAPE

CATS & SOUP by HIDEA

Cats are Cute: Pop Time by kkiruk studio

Detective Mio by 1N1

Dicast: Rules of Chaos by BSS COMPANY

Forest Island by Nanali Studios

Frontier of Fortune by Dotomchi Games Inc.

FUNKYGUNNER by FUNKY5

Group Project Simulator! by Studio806

Gun Tactics by Gimle Games

Hybrid Warrior: Dungeon of the Overlord by Cat Lab

Metro Blossom by The Sane Studio

Portal Dungeon by Oblique Line

Rush Hour Rally by Soen Games

The Way Home by CONCODE

Titan Slayer by Touchholic


Sign up to attend the South Korean finals


PS: Curious to hear who was selected for the Indie Games Accelerator? Attend the European Festival to find out!

Cheer on the finalists of our Indie Games Festival

On September 4, we’re celebrating some of the best indie talent on Google Play during the Indie Games Festival finals for Europe, Japan and South Korea. This year the three festivals are virtual, so you can join us to discover the games, meet the developers who created them, cheer them on and be the first to hear who the winners are. 


In June we kicked off the Indie Games Festival – a competition to celebrate the innovation and creativity that indie developers bring to Google Play. We received thousands of submissions, showing our judges how unique and diverse our games developer community is. 


The panel of judges have now selected 20 games in each region – listed below – to go forward to the finals on September 4. Each finalist receives exclusive promotions and prizes that give their games the recognition they deserve. 


So, don’t miss out. Expect plenty of fun and some very special surprises. Sign up now to virtually attend the festivals for Europe, Japan and South Korea. The events are free to attend and will all take place in the same space, so sign up to one and you will be able to teleport to all events!  

Blobby, the Indie Games Festival mascot, is standing up on a stage with a microphone to announce the finalists of the Europe competition. All finalist icons are on the banner.

Europe


Beat Workers by NaturalPad Games, France

Bird Alone by George Batchelor, United Kingdom

Cats in Time by Pine Studio, Croatia

Figment by Bedtime Digital Games, Denmark

Froglike: The Frog Roguelike by Jimjum Studios, Israel

Garson by Anastasiya Shabunia, Belarus

Gumslinger by Itatake, Sweden

Lyxo by Emoak, Austria

Psychofunk by Tommy Søreide Kjær, Norway

Railways by Infinity Games, Portugal

Sticky Terms by kamibox, Germany

Sweet Sins Superstars by Platonic Games, Spain

Tiny Robots Recharged by Big Loop Studios, Bulgaria

Tofu Drifter by Roach Games, Russia

Towers by JOX Development, Ukraine

Unholy Adventure by Dali Games, Poland

Warplane Inc by Nuclear Games, Russia

Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown by Ultaan Games, Poland

Woof: The Good Boy Story by CHPV.GAMES, Russia

Zen Symmetry by 8tbl, Russia


Sign up to attend the European finals.
Blobby, the Indie Games Festival mascot, is standing up on a stage with a microphone to announce the finalists of the Japan competition. All finalist icons are on the banner.

Japan


3D Chess: NOCCA NOCCA by Curiouspark, Inc.

5colors in Nate by NekodoraSoft

Amabie san by HARAPECORPORATION Inc.

Archer Battle Online by Takuya Fujieda

Cthulhu DreamStairs by Tenyu

ElectriarCode by ELECTRIAR LABO / Blue

Escape from the Closed Circle by Hanachiru

Heart  of Sengoku by ZEN APP

Leaving Two Tiles Dojo by ScreenPocket

Living in the Ending World by illuCalab.

MAKOTO WAKAIDO’s Case Files “Executioner’s Wedge” by HafHaf-Oden (Sukashiuma-LAB)

Mini Mini Farm by CoffeeBreak

MonohakobiPro by CGO

Mousebusters by Odencat

Numpurr Card Wars by Nukenin

Parasite Days by Zxima

Quantum Transport by ruccho

Super Glitter Rush by tiny cactus studio

Survivor's guilt by aso

Wolf Chess by baton inc.


Sign up to attend the Japanese finals.
Blobby, the Indie Games Festival mascot, is standing up on a stage with a microphone to announce the finalists of the South Korea competition. All finalist logos are on the banner.

South Korea


Angel Saga by Alchemist Games Inc.

Animal Card Royale by Banjihagames

Animal Doll Shop by Funnyeve

BattleLive: Zombie&Human by PLOTRICK

Box It Up! Inc. by team TAPE

CATS & SOUP by HIDEA

Cats are Cute: Pop Time by kkiruk studio

Detective Mio by 1N1

Dicast: Rules of Chaos by BSS COMPANY

Forest Island by Nanali Studios

Frontier of Fortune by Dotomchi Games Inc.

FUNKYGUNNER by FUNKY5

Group Project Simulator! by Studio806

Gun Tactics by Gimle Games

Hybrid Warrior: Dungeon of the Overlord by Cat Lab

Metro Blossom by The Sane Studio

Portal Dungeon by Oblique Line

Rush Hour Rally by Soen Games

The Way Home by CONCODE

Titan Slayer by Touchholic


Sign up to attend the South Korean finals


PS: Curious to hear who was selected for the Indie Games Accelerator? Attend the European Festival to find out!

Smart Compose now available in comments for Google Slides, Sheets, and Drawings

Quick launch summary

Last year, we announced Smart Compose in Google Docs, a feature that helps you compose high-quality content faster and more easily. Smart Compose saves you time by cutting back on repetitive writing, reducing the chance of spelling and grammatical errors, and suggesting relevant contextual phrases.

Now, Smart Compose is available in comments for Google Slides, Sheets, and Drawings.

Image of Smart Compose offering a suggestion in a comment
Smart Compose offering a suggestion in a comment.



Getting started

  • End users: This feature will be ON by default and can be disabled by going to Tools > Preferences and unchecking “Show Smart Compose Suggestions.” When enabled, you’ll automatically see Smart Compose suggestions. To accept a suggestion you like, press “tab” or press the right arrow key. Visit the Help Center to learn more about using Smart Compose in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings.

Rollout pace

  • This feature is available now for all users.

Availability

  • Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Frontline, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Plus, Nonprofits, Cloud Identity Free, Cloud Identity Premium

Resources

Google Tensor debuts on the new Pixel 6 this fall

In 2016, we launched the first Pixel. Our goal was to give people a more helpful, smarter phone. Over the years, we introduced features like HDR+ andNight Sight, which used artificial intelligence (AI) to create beautiful images with computational photography. In later years, we applied powerful speech recognition models to build Recorder, which can record, transcribe and search for audio clips, all on device.

AI is the future of our innovation work, but the problem is we’ve run into computing limitations that prevented us from fully pursuing our mission. So we set about building a technology platform built for mobile that enabled us to bring our most innovative AI and machine learning (ML) to our Pixel users. We set out to make our own System on a Chip (SoC) to power Pixel 6. And now, years later, it’s almost here. 

Tensor is our first custom-built SoC specifically for Pixel phones, and it will power the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro later this fall.

Google Tensor

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro debut this fall, and that’s when we'll share all the details we normally release at launch like new features, technical specs and pricing and availability. But today, we’re giving you a preview of what’s to come. 

Industrial design

These new phones redefine what it means to be a Pixel. From the new design that combines the same beautiful aesthetic across software and hardware with Android 12, to the new Tensor SoC, everything about using the Pixel is better.

We also upgraded the rear camera system. The improved sensors and lenses are now too big to fit into the traditional square — so the new design gives the whole camera system a new home with the camera bar. 

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro

The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro have new materials and finishes, too — like the Pro’s light polished aluminum frame, and the 6’s matte aluminum finish. And they both feel great in your hand. 

Material You

Google announced Android 12 and the new Material You design language at Google I/O. With Material You, we’re mixing color science with years of work in interaction design and engineering. These UI updates are grounded in the new animation and design framework — to make using your Pixel feel incredibly natural because everything runs smoothly on the Tensor chip. 

Tensor 

Tensor was built for how people use their phones today and how people will use them in the future. As more and more features are powered by AI and ML it’s not simply about adding more computing resources, it’s about using that ML to unlock specific experiences for our Pixel users.


The team that designed our silicon wanted to make Pixel even more capable. For example, with Tensor we thought about every piece of the chip and customized it to run Google's computational photography models. For users, this means entirely new features, plus improvements to existing ones. 


Tensor enables us to make the Google phones we’ve always envisioned —  phones that keep getting better, while tapping the most powerful parts of Google, all in a highly personalized experience. And with Tensor’s new security core and Titan M2, Pixel 6 will have the most layers of hardware security in any phone**.


You’ll see this in everything from the completely revamped camera system to speech recognition and much more. So whether you're trying to capture that family photo when your kids won’t stand still, or communicate with a relative in another language, Pixel will be there — and it will be more helpful than ever. We look forward to sharing more about Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro later this year. 


* These devices have not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission or other regulators. These devices may not be sold or otherwise distributed until required legal authorizations have been obtained

**Based on a count of independent hardware security subsystems and components.

Google Tensor debuts on the new Pixel 6 this fall

In 2016, we launched the first Pixel. Our goal was to give people a more helpful, smarter phone. Over the years, we introduced features like HDR+ andNight Sight, which used artificial intelligence (AI) to create beautiful images with computational photography. In later years, we applied powerful speech recognition models to build Recorder, which can record, transcribe and search for audio clips, all on device.

AI is the future of our innovation work, but the problem is we’ve run into computing limitations that prevented us from fully pursuing our mission. So we set about building a technology platform built for mobile that enabled us to bring our most innovative AI and machine learning (ML) to our Pixel users. We set out to make our own System on a Chip (SoC) to power Pixel 6. And now, years later, it’s almost here. 

Tensor is our first custom-built SoC specifically for Pixel phones, and it will power the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro later this fall.

Google Tensor

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro debut this fall, and that’s when we'll share all the details we normally release at launch like new features, technical specs and pricing and availability. But today, we’re giving you a preview of what’s to come. 

Industrial design

These new phones redefine what it means to be a Pixel. From the new design that combines the same beautiful aesthetic across software and hardware with Android 12, to the new Tensor SoC, everything about using the Pixel is better.

We also upgraded the rear camera system. The improved sensors and lenses are now too big to fit into the traditional square — so the new design gives the whole camera system a new home with the camera bar. 

Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro

The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro have new materials and finishes, too — like the Pro’s light polished aluminum frame, and the 6’s matte aluminum finish. And they both feel great in your hand. 

Material You

Google announced Android 12 and the new Material You design language at Google I/O. With Material You, we’re mixing color science with years of work in interaction design and engineering. These UI updates are grounded in the new animation and design framework — to make using your Pixel feel incredibly natural because everything runs smoothly on the Tensor chip. 

Tensor 

Tensor was built for how people use their phones today and how people will use them in the future. As more and more features are powered by AI and ML it’s not simply about adding more computing resources, it’s about using that ML to unlock specific experiences for our Pixel users.


The team that designed our silicon wanted to make Pixel even more capable. For example, with Tensor we thought about every piece of the chip and customized it to run Google's computational photography models. For users, this means entirely new features, plus improvements to existing ones. 


Tensor enables us to make the Google phones we’ve always envisioned —  phones that keep getting better, while tapping the most powerful parts of Google, all in a highly personalized experience. And with Tensor’s new security core and Titan M2, Pixel 6 will have the most layers of hardware security in any phone**.


You’ll see this in everything from the completely revamped camera system to speech recognition and much more. So whether you're trying to capture that family photo when your kids won’t stand still, or communicate with a relative in another language, Pixel will be there — and it will be more helpful than ever. We look forward to sharing more about Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro later this year. 


* These devices have not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission or other regulators. These devices may not be sold or otherwise distributed until required legal authorizations have been obtained

**Based on a count of independent hardware security subsystems and components.

Meet some of the best indie game devs

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Global Developer Marketing

During the month of June we received thousands of submissions for two of our annual developer programs - the Indie Games Accelerator and the Indie Games Festival. These programs support the growth of small games studios on Google Play.

Every year we’re impressed with the art and creativity of the entries. This year was no exception. Many thanks to everyone who submitted their game.

Meet the Festival finalists

Today, we’re announcing the finalists of the Festivals in Europe, Japan, and South Koreadrumroll, please.

Indie Games

Europe

Beat Workers by NaturalPad Games, France

Bird Alone by George Batchelor, United Kingdom

Cats in Time by Pine Studio, Croatia

Figment by Bedtime Digital Games, Denmark

Froglike: The Frog Roguelike by Jimjum Studios, Israel

Garson by Anastasiya Shabunia, Belarus

Gumslinger by Itatake, Sweden

Lyxo by Emoak, Austria

Psychofunk by Tommy Søreide Kjær, Norway

Railways by Infinity Games, Portugal

Sticky Terms by kamibox, Germany

Sweet Sins Superstars by Platonic Games, Spain

Tiny Robots Recharged by Big Loop Studios, Bulgaria

Tofu Drifter by Roach Games, Russia

Towers by JOX Development, Ukraine

Unholy Adventure by Dali Games, Poland

Warplane Inc by Nuclear Games, Russia

Watch Me Stream My Mental Breakdown by Ultaan Games, Poland

Woof: The Good Boy Story by CHPV.GAMES, Russia

Zen Symmetry by 8tbl, Russia

Sign up to attend the European finals.

Indie Games

Japan

3D Chess: NOCCA NOCCA by Curiouspark, Inc.

5colors in Nate by NekodoraSoft

Amabie san by HARAPECORPORATION Inc.

Archer Battle Online by Takuya Fujieda

Cthulhu DreamStairs by Tenyu

ElectriarCode by ELECTRIAR LABO

Escape from the Closed Circle by Hanachiru

Heart of Sengoku by ZEN APP

Leaving Two Tiles Dojo by ScreenPocket

Living in the Ending World by illuCalab.

MAKOTO WAKAIDO’s Case Files “Executioner’s Wedge” by HafHaf-Oden(Sukashiuma-LAB)

Mini Mini Farm by CoffeeBreak

MonohakobiPro by CGO

Mousebusters by Odencat

Numpurr Card Wars by Nukenin

Parasite Days by Zxima

Quantum Transport by ruccho

Super Glitter Rush by tiny cactus studio

Survivor's guilt by aso

Wolf Chess by Baton

Sign up to attend the Japanese finals.

Indie Games

South Korea

Angel Saga by Alchemist Games Inc.

Animal Card Royale by Banjihagames

Animal Doll Shop by Funnyeve

BattleLive: Zombie&Human by PLOTRICK

Box It Up! Inc. by team TAPE

CATS & SOUP by HIDEA

Cats are Cute: Pop Time by kkiruk studio

Detective Mio by 1N1

Dicast: Rules of Chaos by BSS COMPANY

Forest Island by Nanali Studios

Frontier of Fortune by Dotomchi Games Inc.

FUNKYGUNNER by FUNKY5

Group Project Simulator! by Studio806

Gun Tactics by Gimle Games

Hybrid Warrior: Dungeon of the Overlord by Cat Lab

Metro Blossom by The Sane Studio

Portal Dungeon by Oblique Line

Rush Hour Rally by Soen Games

The Way Home by CONCODE

Titan Slayer by Touchholic

Sign up to attend the South Korean finals.

Join the adventure on September 4

This year the three Festivals are virtual, so everyone has the chance to explore the games, meet the developers who made them, cheer them on, and be the first to hear who the winners are.

Expect plenty of fun and some very special surprises. So, don’t miss out. Sign up now to virtually attend the events showcasing the finalists from Europe, Japan, and South Korea. The events are free to attend and will all take place in the same space, so sign up to one and you will be able to teleport to all events!

How about the Indie Games Accelerator?

If you’re interested in knowing which developers are joining the 2021 class of the Indie Games Accelerator, sign up to attend the European Festival, where we will also announce the selected developers.

Indie Games