Pray #WithMe: Connect online with your faith community

This week, millions of people across the globe will celebrate Passover and Easter. And in the coming weeks, millions will begin to observe Ramadan. This year, these important religious holidays will feel very different, as faith organizations all over the world look for new ways to celebrate safely in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 within their communities.

During these difficult times, it’s important for us to continue to connect with each other and feel part of our wider communities, even from home.

While some faith organizations have used digital tools to connect with their congregations for many years, this year’s broadly mandated orders to stay home will make it essential for churches, synagogues, mosques, families and individuals to find new ways of coming together, online.

The shift has already begun - since the start of March, the combined subscribers of all Vatican News channels has more than doubled.

To assist faith organizations everywhere who are new to online services, YouTube has brought together helpful information to get started with live streaming. Please visit our Playlist and Help Center for best practices, or check out instructions for hosting a live stream event either from a mobile device or desktop.

African artists are also joining this special weekend of music and celebration. We invite you to join top African artists like Jethro Tait, Joeboy, King Perry, and Nasty C as they make music and chat with fans. As it is Easter weekend, gospel music lovers can join special performances hosted by top African gospel artists such as Benjamin Dube, Folabi Nuel, Glowreeyah, Mnqobi Nxumalo, Mthunzi Namba and Nosa, . Please visit goo.gle/stayhomewithme for the complete schedule and YouTube livestream links.
We also invite you to celebrate with a special Saturday Night Seder, premiering exclusively on YouTube via Tasty and SaturdayNightSeder on Saturday, April 11th at 12am GMT. This Passover-themed variety show will raise funds for the CDC Foundation, and includes comedy sketches, heartfelt moments and music, with an impressive list of participants including Jason Alexander, Ben Platt, Idina Menzel, Dan Levy, Henry Winkler, Tan France and Senator Chuck Schumer, among many others.

For those celebrating Good Friday and Easter, many churches are hosting live streams for their local congregations, so please check in with your church. The Vatican will live stream all of its Holy Week services from St. Peter’s Basilica, including Easter Sunday mass at 9AM GMT

Renowned opera singer Andrea Bocelli will perform live at 5PM GMT on Sunday, April 12 from Milan’s historic Duomo Cathedral, available exclusively on YouTube. The concert entitled, “Music For Hope,” will represent a message of love, healing and hope to Italy and the world. The Duomo, currently closed, will open its doors exceptionally for Andrea Bocelli who will be accompanied only by the cathedral organist, Emanuele Vianelli, playing one of world’s largest pipe organs. The “Music For Hope” trailer can be seen here.

We’ll have more to share in the next few weeks about upcoming Ramadan celebrations.

We wish safe and healthy holidays for faith communities across the world.
-- The YouTube Team



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Pray #WithMe: Connect online with your faith community

This week, millions of people across the globe will celebrate Passover and Easter. And in the coming weeks, millions will begin to observe Ramadan. This year, these important religious holidays will feel very different, as faith organizations all over the world look for new ways to celebrate safely in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 within their communities.

During these difficult times, it’s important for us to continue to connect with each other and feel part of our wider communities, even from home.

While some faith organizations have used digital tools to connect with their congregations for many years, this year’s broadly mandated orders to stay home will make it essential for churches, synagogues, mosques, families and individuals to find new ways of coming together, online.

The shift has already begun - since the start of March, the combined subscribers of all Vatican News channels has more than doubled.

To assist faith organizations everywhere who are new to online services, YouTube has brought together helpful information to get started with live streaming. Please visit our Playlist and Help Center for best practices, or check out instructions for hosting a live stream event either from a mobile device or desktop.

African artists are also joining this special weekend of music and celebration. We invite you to join top African artists like Jethro Tait, Joeboy, King Perry, and Nasty C as they make music and chat with fans. As it is Easter weekend, gospel music lovers can join special performances hosted by top African gospel artists such as Benjamin Dube, Folabi Nuel, Glowreeyah, Mnqobi Nxumalo, Mthunzi Namba and Nosa, . Please visit goo.gle/stayhomewithme for the complete schedule and YouTube livestream links.
We also invite you to celebrate with a special Saturday Night Seder, premiering exclusively on YouTube via Tasty and SaturdayNightSeder on Saturday, April 11th at 12am GMT. This Passover-themed variety show will raise funds for the CDC Foundation, and includes comedy sketches, heartfelt moments and music, with an impressive list of participants including Jason Alexander, Ben Platt, Idina Menzel, Dan Levy, Henry Winkler, Tan France and Senator Chuck Schumer, among many others.

For those celebrating Good Friday and Easter, many churches are hosting live streams for their local congregations, so please check in with your church. The Vatican will live stream all of its Holy Week services from St. Peter’s Basilica, including Easter Sunday mass at 9AM GMT

Renowned opera singer Andrea Bocelli will perform live at 5PM GMT on Sunday, April 12 from Milan’s historic Duomo Cathedral, available exclusively on YouTube. The concert entitled, “Music For Hope,” will represent a message of love, healing and hope to Italy and the world. The Duomo, currently closed, will open its doors exceptionally for Andrea Bocelli who will be accompanied only by the cathedral organist, Emanuele Vianelli, playing one of world’s largest pipe organs. The “Music For Hope” trailer can be seen here.

We’ll have more to share in the next few weeks about upcoming Ramadan celebrations.

We wish safe and healthy holidays for faith communities across the world.
-- The YouTube Team



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Dev Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Dev channel is being updated to 83.0.4103.6 (Platform version: 13020.8.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates. Systems will be receiving updates over the next several days.





If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using 'Report an issue...' in the Chrome menu (3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the browser).

Cindy Bayless
Google Chrome OS

Dev Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Dev channel is being updated to 83.0.4103.6 (Platform version: 13020.8.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates. Systems will be receiving updates over the next several days.





If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using 'Report an issue...' in the Chrome menu (3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the browser).

Cindy Bayless
Google Chrome OS

Extending availability of Google Meet advanced features to all customers through September 30, 2020

What’s changing

Last month, we made our advanced Google Meet video-conferencing capabilities available at no cost to all G Suite Basic, Business, Education, and Nonprofit customers. We’re extending that availability to September 30, 2020, to ensure businesses, organizations, and educators continue their work during this crisis. See our previous post for more details on these features.

In addition, we’re dropping “Hangouts” from the Google Meet name. You’ll start to see this change reflected in the product and across resources over the next few weeks.

Who’s impacted

Admins and end users

Why it’s important

We hope this extension makes it easier for our customers to operate during this crisis. We also recognize that as work and learning are increasingly done from a distance, maintaining security and control across your organization is all the more critical. Check out our post on the G Suite blog to learn more about how Google Meet keeps your organization’s information safe.

Getting started

Admins: If you haven’t yet done so, enable Meet video calling for your organization. You can then turn on live streaming and recording.

  • G Suite Basic, Business, and Nonprofit customers: These advanced features are OFF by default and can be enabled at the domain, OU, or group level.
  • G Suite for Education customers: These advanced features are OFF by default and can be enabled at the domain, OU, or group level. Please see our FAQ in the Help Center for additional education-specific considerations when enabling Meet and these features.
  • G Suite Enterprise and Enterprise for Education customers: These features are already available in your domain and will continue to respect your current settings.

End users: Once enabled in the Admin console, end users can live stream and record meetings. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how to live stream and record a meeting.

Rollout pace


  • Free access to advanced features is available now to all G Suite customers.

Availability


  • Available to all G Suite customers.

Resources




New Meet features to improve distance learning

Our team has been so inspired by the remarkable work of educators and school leaders around the world, who continue to adapt as schools shift to remote learning. Today, 120 million students and educators are using G Suite for Education worldwide to create, collaborate and communicate despite school closures. With this increase in usage, one consistent theme we’ve heard is that educators are looking for ways to continue teaching and collaborating in a virtual environment that is safe and secure. We’re sharing some ways we’re making Google Meet, a core service of G Suite for Education, work even betterfor schools.

Extension of access to premium Google Meet features

In order to support ongoing institutional needs, we've extended access to premium Meet features at no cost for all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users until September 30, 2020. This means you can have meetings for up to 250 participants per call, live streams for up to 100,000 viewers within your domain, and record meetings and save them to Google Drive. 

Better together: Using Google Meet inside Classroom

More than 100 million students and educators worldwide are now using Classroom. To make it easier to have classes remotely, we’re integrating Classroom and Meet, putting both tools in one place.

Educators can create a unique Meet link for each class, which is displayed on the Classroom Stream and Classwork pages. The link acts as a dedicated meeting space for each class, making it easy for both teachers and students to join.

The Meet links created by the Classroom integration are nicknamed meetings. For education users, participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left, unless they have meeting creation privileges to start a new meeting. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

1002-GDU-ClassroomHangoutLink-DF-NoTitle-v2.gif

To use this integration, school administrators need to turn on Meet for their domain. Administrators can grant meeting creationprivileges to individuals or groups, and we recommend that you assign creation privileges to the organizational units (OUs) that contain your faculty and staff members, which means that students will only be able to join meetings created by faculty or staff.

How Google Meet keeps your video conferences protected

With Meet, institutions can take advantage of the same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that Google uses to secure your information. Meet includes protections to safeguard student and educator privacy, including:

  • Meet adheres to IETF security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP).

  • In Meet, all data is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware.

  • Each Meeting ID is 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set, so it’s difficult to make an unauthorized attempt to join the meeting by guessing the ID. 

  • To limit the attack surface and eliminate the need to push out frequent security patches, Meet works entirely in your browser. This means we do not require or ask for any plugins or software to be installed if you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge. On mobile, we recommend that you install the Meet app. 

  • Supporting compliance requirements around regulations including COPPA, FERPA, GDPR, and HIPAA.


For tips and best practices for admins on securely deploying Meet to your education domain, visit the Meet security and privacy for education page.

New Google Meet features to help educators keep meetings safe 

We're rolling out additional features today to all G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education users to give educators control over their meetings, making them more secure:

  • Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can't be removed or muted by student participants.

  • Only meeting creators and calendar owners can approve requests to join made by participants outside of the school’s domain. This means that students can’t allow external participants to join via video and that external participants can’t join before the instructor.

  • Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.

For educators wanting to learn more about Meet and how to use it with their students, we recommend checking out Teach From Home, a hub for distance learning resources. 

Create your own Street View imagery with new 360 cameras

Spring is my favorite time of year. The flowers are blooming and my local farmers market begins to buzz with smiling faces and seasonal produce. On my recent trip, I took a bunch of pictures and was eager to invite my family who lives on the other side of the globe to wander through my local farmers market. Flipping through static photos doesn’t quite bring it to life—you really want others to feel what it was like to shop perfect produce in the sunshine.

Famers Market
Farmers Market - Mountain View, California

Today we're announcing a simple way to share your perspective, with a new "street view ready" certification standard integrated with 20 new 360-degree cameras coming to market in 2017. Whether you’re sharing your experience at a local market or on your recent vacation, publishing high-quality, interactive imagery no longer requires significant time and effort—all you have to do is get one of the cameras, download the Street View app and start creating. You can walk, run, bike, drive—even ride a horse—while we do the heavy lifting of connecting each frame of your video into a traditional, interactive Street View experience.

The cameras, which will be released over the coming months, all meet one of four new “Street View ready” standards, giving you the flexibility to choose the best way to upload imagery based on your interests.

  • Street View mobile ready: 360 cameras that can publish Street View directly from a mobile app—without requiring a desktop workflow

  • Street View auto ready: 360 cameras tailored for vehicle-based collection with the highest accuracy

  • Street View vr ready: 360 cameras or systems that collect geometry in addition to generating sets of connected 360 photos

  • Street View workflow ready: Publishing tools (sometimes bundled with cameras) that can upload to Street View accounts

To learn more about each of our Street View ready standards, visit our developer website. In addition, many industry partners will be debuting their Street View ready hardware and desktop applications this week at our Street View Summit in Tokyo, Japan.
Street View Ready Partners
Cameras and publishing apps are being prepared for certification under any of our four new standards

These tools are for anyone. Whether you’re an avid traveler or a professional photographer enrolled in our Street View trusted photographer program, Street View ready will give you what you need to recreate a place or space and invite others in.

Source: Google LatLong


Free Universal Sound Separation

We are happy to announce the release of FUSS: the Free Universal Sound Separation dataset.

Audio recordings often contain a mixture of different sound sources; Universal sound separation is the ability to separate such a mixture into its component sounds, regardless of the types of sound present. Previously, sound separation work has focused on separating mixtures of a small number of sound types, such as "speech" versus "nonspeech", or different instances of the same type of sound, such as speaker #1 versus speaker #2. Often in such work, the number of sounds in a mixture is also assumed to be known a priori. The FUSS dataset shifts focus to the more general problem of separating a variable number of arbitrary sounds from one another.

One major hurdle to training models in this domain is that even if you have high-quality recordings of sound mixtures, you can't easily annotate these recordings with ground truth. High-quality simulation is one approach to overcome this limitation. To achieve good results, you need a diverse set of sounds, a realistic room simulator, and code to mix these elements together for realistic, multi-source, multi-class audio with ground truth. With FUSS, we are releasing all three of these.

FUSS relies on Creative Commons licensed audio clips from freesound.org. We filtered these by license type, then using a pre-release of FSD50k [1], further filtered out sounds that aren't separable by humans when mixed together. We were left with about 23 hours of audio, consisting of 12,377 sounds useful for mixing (7,237 train, 2,883 validation, 2,257 eval). Using these clips, we created 20,000 training mixtures, 1,000 validation mixtures, and 1,000 eval mixtures.

We developed our own room simulator implemented in tensorflow, which generates the impulse response of a box shaped room with frequency-dependent reflective properties given a sound source location and a mic location. As part of the dataset release, we provide pre-calculated room impulse responses used for each audio sample along with mixing code, so the research community can simulate novel audio without running the computationally expensive room simulator. Future work may include releasing the code for our room simulator and extending the simulator capabilities to address more extensive acoustic properties of rooms, materials with different reflective properties, novel room shapes, etc.

Finally, we have released a masking-based separation model, based on an improved time-domain convolutional network (TDCN++), described in our recent publications [2, 3]. On the eval set, this model achieves 12.5 dB of scale-invariant signal-to-noise ratio improvement (SI-SNRi) on mixtures with two to four sources, while reconstructing single-source mixtures with 37.6 dB absolute SI-SNR.

Source audio, reverb impulse responses, reverberated mixtures and sources created by the mixing code, and a baseline model checkpoint are available for download. Code for reverberating and mixing the audio data and for training the released model is available on our github page.

The dataset will also be used in the DCASE challenge, as a component of the Sound Event Detection and Separation task. The released model will serve as a baseline for this competition, and a benchmark to demonstrate progress against in future experiments.

Our hope is this dataset will lower the barrier to new research, and particularly will allow for fast iteration and application of novel techniques from other machine learning domains to the sound separation challenge.

By John Hershey, Scott Wisdom, and Hakan Erdogan, Google Research

References:
[1] Eduardo Fonseca, Jordi Pons, Xavier Favory, Frederic Font Corbera, Dmitry Bogdanov, Andrés Ferraro, Sergio Oramas, Alastair Porter, and Xavier Serra. "Freesound Datasets: A Platform for the Creation of Open Audio Datasets." International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pp. 486–493. Suzhou, China, 2017.
[2] Ilya Kavalerov, Scott Wisdom, Hakan Erdogan, Brian Patton, Kevin Wilson, Jonathan Le Roux, and John R. Hershey. "Universal Sound Separation." IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), pp. 175-179. New Paltz, NY, USA, 2019.
[3] Efthymios Tzinis, Scott Wisdom, John R. Hershey, Aren Jansen, and Daniel P. W. Ellis. "Improving Universal Sound Separation Using Sound Classification." IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020.

A new keyboard for typing braille on Android

Over 150 years ago, the invention of braille was revolutionary in making reading and writing accessible to blind people. Today, braille displays make typing accessible on most phones and computers through a physical braille keyboard. But it can be time-consuming to connect an external device each time you want to type something quickly on your phone. 


TalkBack braille keyboard is a new virtual braille keyboard integrated directly into Android. It’s a fast, convenient way to type on your phone without any additional hardware, whether you’re posting on social media, responding to a text, or writing a brief email. As part of our mission to make the world’s information universally accessible, we hope this keyboard can broadly expand braille literacy and exposure among blind and low vision people. 

UI + shell.png

Caption: A built-in braille keyboard for Android phones


Our team collaborated with braille developers and users throughout the development of this feature, so it’ll be familiar to anyone who has typed using braille before. It uses a standard 6-key layout and each key represents one of 6 braille dots which, when tapped, make any letter or symbol. To type an “A” you would press dot 1 and to type a “B,”  dots 1 and 2 together. 

blogpost-header-v02.gif

Caption: Type braille wherever you want—in an email, a text message, a doc, or social media

The keyboard can be used anywhere you would normally type and allows you to delete letters and words, add lines, and submit text. You can turn the keyboard on and off as simply as switching between international keyboards. (Note: TalkBack gestures are not supported when the keyboard is on.)


To use the braille keyboard, turn on TalkBack in the Accessibility section within Settings, and follow these instructions to set it up. Once you set up the keyboard, use three fingers to swipe up on your screen and try practicing with the gestures tutorial. 


Talkback braille keyboard is rolling out to Android devices running version 6.0 or later, starting today. It works across all apps on your Android device, supports braille grade 1 and grade 2 and is available initially in English. 

Source: Android


A new keyboard for typing braille on Android

Over 150 years ago, the invention of braille was revolutionary in making reading and writing accessible to blind people. Today, braille displays make typing accessible on most phones and computers through a physical braille keyboard. But it can be time-consuming to connect an external device each time you want to type something quickly on your phone. 


TalkBack braille keyboard is a new virtual braille keyboard integrated directly into Android. It’s a fast, convenient way to type on your phone without any additional hardware, whether you’re posting on social media, responding to a text, or writing a brief email. As part of our mission to make the world’s information universally accessible, we hope this keyboard can broadly expand braille literacy and exposure among blind and low vision people. 

UI + shell.png

Caption: A built-in braille keyboard for Android phones


Our team collaborated with braille developers and users throughout the development of this feature, so it’ll be familiar to anyone who has typed using braille before. It uses a standard 6-key layout and each key represents one of 6 braille dots which, when tapped, make any letter or symbol. To type an “A” you would press dot 1 and to type a “B,”  dots 1 and 2 together. 

blogpost-header-v02.gif

Caption: Type braille wherever you want—in an email, a text message, a doc, or social media

The keyboard can be used anywhere you would normally type and allows you to delete letters and words, add lines, and submit text. You can turn the keyboard on and off as simply as switching between international keyboards. (Note: TalkBack gestures are not supported when the keyboard is on.)


To use the braille keyboard, turn on TalkBack in the Accessibility section within Settings, and follow these instructions to set it up. Once you set up the keyboard, use three fingers to swipe up on your screen and try practicing with the gestures tutorial. 


Talkback braille keyboard is rolling out to Android devices running version 5.0 or later, starting today. It works across all apps on your Android device, supports braille grade 1 and grade 2 and is available initially in English. 

Source: Android