The quality of the air we breathe has a major impact on our health. Even in Amsterdam, a city where bikes make up 36 percent of the traffic, the average life span is cut short by a year as a result of polluted air. Information about air quality at the street level can help pinpoint areas where the quality is poor, which is useful for all types of people—whether you’re a bicyclist on your daily commute, a parent taking your children to a local park, or an urban planner designing new communities.
A Street View car in Amsterdam.
Project Air View
Building on efforts in London and Copenhagen, Google and the municipality of Amsterdam are now working together to gain insight into the city’s air quality at the street level. Amsterdam already measures air quality at several points around the city. Information from two of our Street View cars in Project Air View will augment the measurements from these fixed locations, to yield a more detailed street-by-street picture of the city’s air quality.
To take the measurements, the Street View cars will be equipped with air sensors to measure nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, ultra-fine dust and soot (extremely small particles that are hardly ever measured). Scientists from Utrecht University are equipping the air sensors into the vehicles, and working with the municipality and Google to plan the routes for driving and lead the data validation and analysis. Once the data validation and analysis is complete, we’ll share helpful insights with the public, so that everyone—citizens, scientists, authorities and organizations—can make more informed decisions.
This research can spread awareness about air pollution and help people take action. For example, if the research shows differences in air quality between certain areas in the city, people could adjust their bike route or choose another time to exercise. Our hope is that small changes like this can help improve overall quality of life. For more information about Project Air View, visit g.co/earth/airquality.
Highway Inn is an Oahu-based restaurant founded by Hawaii-born Japanese-American Seiichi Toguchi. At the start of World War II, Seiichi was taken from his home to an internment camp in California and assigned to work in the mess halls. There, Japanese-American chefs from around the country taught him how to cook, eventually inspiring him to open Highway Inn to share the foods he loved growing up. Seiichi passed the restaurant down to his son Bobby Toguchi, who has since passed it to his daughter, Monica Toguchi Ryan. Their family has been proudly serving authentic Hawaiian food for over 70 years.
As the third generation owner, Monica was determined to not just honor her family traditions and legacy, but also to share with younger generations the kinds of food that keep them connected to Hawaiian and local food culture. When her grandfather started the restaurant, he relied on word of mouth to reach new customers. Now, Monica uses Google Ads and their Business Profile on Google to connect with customers, helping them to grow from one location to three across Oahu. She and her family hope to continue preserving the beauty and tradition of Hawaiian food for generations to come.
This Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we're telling this and other stories, like Kruti Dance Academy from Atlanta, Georgia. They are two of the many Asian American and Pacific Islander-owned small businesses having an impact on their local communities.
Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Beta 75 (75.0.3770.40) for Android: it's now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
Whether it’s delivering search results in the correct language or recommending the quickest route home, data can make Google products more helpful to you. And you should be able to understand and manage your data—and make privacy choices that are right for you. That’s why easy-to-use privacy features and controls have always been built into our products. We made some privacy related announcements last week that we want to highlight during Privacy Awareness Week when a lot of people and businesses are actively thinking about privacy.
One-tap access to your Google Account from all our major products A few years ago, we introduced Google Account to provide a comprehensive view of the information you’ve shared and saved with Google, and one place to access your privacy and security settings. Privacy controls should be easy to find and use and now we’re making it even easier to find these controls. Today you’ll see your Google Account profile picture appear in the top right corner across products like Gmail, Drive, Contacts and Pay. To quickly access your privacy controls, just tap on your picture and follow the link to your Google Account.
Auto-Delete Options We are also introducing automatic deletion options, which will enable Google users to set a time limit for how long they want some data to be saved. They can choose to automatically delete data from their account after 3 or 18 months. These controls are available now for Web and App Activity and they will be launched for Location History in the coming weeks.
Your Data in Maps, the Assistant, and more Late last year, we launched a new feature called Your Data in Search, which puts privacy and security front and centre in Google Search. We are now making this feature available in Google Maps and the Assistant, with YouTube coming later this month. This provides quick access to the most relevant privacy controls by making privacy settings easy to access while using our products. Any older data will be automatically and continuously deleted from your account.
Learn more about how we use data to power Google Maps
Incognito mode in Google apps Incognito is a very popular feature in Chrome and we are bringing this functionality to additional surfaces this year. It’s available in YouTube and is coming soon to Maps and Search. Tap from your profile picture to easily turn it on or off. While using Incognito, a user’s activity, for example the places they search for or navigated to, won’t be linked to their Google account. When users turn off Incognito mode, their apps and devices will be cleared of this history, enabling them to confidently share screens with friends or family.
Chrome privacy enhancements We also announced that we are updating Chrome to provide users with improved controls for managing cookies and stepping up our efforts to restrict “fingerprinting,” to ensure that users’ privacy choices are respected. You can read more about these changes here.
Personalised ads Furthermore, as part of our continued work to improve privacy in the ads-supported ecosystem, Google will provide enhanced visibility into personalised advertising, and we will provide tools for others to do the same. We believe that we can build products and privacy for everyone and we are working to bring a thoughtful and thorough approach to improving user privacy in the ad-supported ecosystem.
Our work on privacy is never done and we will continue to consider new ways for our users to manage their privacy. You can learn more about these updates in our blogpost and check out these 5 things you can do right now to stay safer online.
Posted by Samantha Yorke, Public Policy and Government Relations Senior Counsel, Google Australia
The beta channel has been updated to 75.0.3770.38 for Windows, Mac, and, Linux.
A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how here. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.
Developing Android Apps with Kotlin, developed by Google together with Udacity, is our newly-released, free, self-paced online course. You'll learn how to build Android apps using industry-standard tools and libraries in the Kotlin programming language.
Android development fundamentals are taught in the context of an architecture that provides the scaffolding for robust, maintainable applications. The course covers why and how to use Android Jetpack components such as Room for databases, Work Manager for background processing, the Navigation component, and more. You'll use popular community libraries to simplify common tasks such as Glide for image loading, Retrofit for networking, and Moshi for JSON parsing. The course teaches key Kotlin features such as coroutines to help you write your app code more quickly and concisely.
As you work through the course, you'll build fun and interesting apps, such as a Mars photo gallery, a trivia game, a sleep tracker and much more.
This course is intended for people who have programming experience and are comfortable with Kotlin basics. If you're new to the Kotlin language, we recommend taking the Udacity Kotlin Bootcamp course first.
The course is available free, online at Udacity; take it in your own time at your own pace.
Posted by Ye Jia and Ron Weiss, Software Engineers, Google AI
Speech-to-speech translation systems have been developed over the past several decades with the goal of helping people who speak different languages to communicate with each other. Such systems have usually been broken into three separate components: automatic speech recognition to transcribe the source speech as text, machine translation to translate the transcribed text into the target language, and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) to generate speech in the target language from the translated text. Dividing the task into such a cascade of systems has been very successful, powering many commercial speech-to-speech translation products, including Google Translate.
In “Direct speech-to-speech translation with a sequence-to-sequence model”, we propose an experimental new system that is based on a single attentive sequence-to-sequence model for direct speech-to-speech translation without relying on intermediate text representation. Dubbed Translatotron, this system avoids dividing the task into separate stages, providing a few advantages over cascaded systems, including faster inference speed, naturally avoiding compounding errors between recognition and translation, making it straightforward to retain the voice of the original speaker after translation, and better handling of words that do not need to be translated (e.g., names and proper nouns).
Translatotron The emergence of end-to-end models on speech translation started in 2016, when researchers demonstrated the feasibility of using a single sequence-to-sequence model for speech-to-text translation. In 2017, we demonstrated that such end-to-end models can outperform cascade models. Many approaches to further improve end-to-end speech-to-text translation models have been proposed recently, including our effort on leveraging weakly supervised data. Translatotron goes a step further by demonstrating that a single sequence-to-sequence model can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language, without relying on an intermediate text representation in either language, as is required in cascaded systems.
Translatotron is based on a sequence-to-sequence network which takes source spectrograms as input and generates spectrograms of the translated content in the target language. It also makes use of two other separately trained components: a neural vocoder that converts output spectrograms to time-domain waveforms, and, optionally, a speaker encoder that can be used to maintain the character of the source speaker’s voice in the synthesized translated speech. During training, the sequence-to-sequence model uses a multitask objective to predict source and target transcripts at the same time as generating target spectrograms. However, no transcripts or other intermediate text representations are used during inference.
Model architecture of Translatotron.
Performance We validated Translatotron’s translation quality by measuring the BLEU score, computed with text transcribed by a speech recognition system. Though our results lag behind a conventional cascade system, we have demonstrated the feasibility of the end-to-end direct speech-to-speech translation.
Compared in the audio clips below are the direct speech-to-speech translation output from Translatotron to that of the baseline cascade method. In this case, both systems provide a suitable translation and speak naturally using the same canonical voice.
Preserving Vocal Characteristics By incorporating a speaker encoder network, Translatotron is also able to retain the original speaker’s vocal characteristics in the translated speech, which makes the translated speech sound more natural and less jarring. This feature leverages previous Google research on speaker verification and speaker adaptation for TTS. The speaker encoder is pretrained on the speaker verification task, learning to encode speaker characteristics from a short example utterance. Conditioning the spectrogram decoder on this encoding makes it possible to synthesize speech with similar speaker characteristics, even though the content is in a different language.
The audio clips below demonstrate the performance of Translatotron when transferring the original speaker’s voice to the translated speech. In this example, Translatotron gives more accurate translation than the baseline cascade model, while being able to retain the original speaker’s vocal characteristics. The Translatotron output that retains the original speaker’s voice is trained with less data than the one using the canonical voice, so that they yield slightly different translations.
Conclusion To the best of our knowledge, Translatotron is the first end-to-end model that can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language. It is also able to retain the source speaker’s voice in the translated speech. We hope that this work can serve as a starting point for future research on end-to-end speech-to-speech translation systems.
Acknowledgments This research was a joint work between the Google Brain, Google Translate, and Google Speech teams. Contributors include Ye Jia, Ron J. Weiss, Fadi Biadsy, Wolfgang Macherey, Melvin Johnson, Zhifeng Chen, Mengmeng Niu, Quan Wang, Jason Pelecanos, Ignacio Lopez Moreno, Tom Walters, Heiga Zen, Patrick Nguyen, Yu Zhang, Jonathan Shen, Orhan Firat, and Yonghui Wu. We also thank Jorge Pereira and Stella Laurenzo for verifying the quality of the translation from Translatotron.
Many developers are increasingly focused on growing their businesses globally, and there were more than 94 billion apps downloaded from Google Play in the last year, reaching more than 190 countries. The regulatory environment is frequently changing in local markets, and in some countries local governments have implemented withholding tax requirements on transactions with which Google or our payment processor partners must comply. We strive to help both developers and Google meet local tax requirements in markets where we do business, and where Google or our payment processor partners are required to withhold taxes, we may need to deduct those amounts from our payments to developers.
Due to new requirements in some markets, we'll be rolling out withholding taxes soon to all those doing business in those countries. We wanted to bring this to the attention of Google Play developers to allow you time to prepare for these upcoming changes and take any necessary measures to meet these obligations. We strongly recommend developers consult with a professional tax advisor on your individual tax implications in affected markets and for guidance on the potential impact on your business so that you can make any necessary preparations.
The first countries where we will roll out these changes will be Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Myanmar. You can refer to the Google Play help center page to stay informed on future updates and changes.
Posted by Christiaan Brand, Product Manager, Google Cloud
We’ve become aware of an issue that affects the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) version of the Titan Security Key available in the U.S. and are providing users with the immediate steps they need to take to protect themselves and to receive a free replacement key. This bug affects Bluetooth pairing only, so non-Bluetooth security keys are not affected. Current users of Bluetooth Titan Security Keys should continue to use their existing keys while waiting for a replacement, since security keys provide the strongest protection against phishing.
What is the security issue?
Due to a misconfiguration in the Titan Security Keys’ Bluetooth pairing protocols, it is possible for an attacker who is physically close to you at the moment you use your security key -- within approximately 30 feet -- to (a) communicate with your security key, or (b)communicate with the device to which your key is paired. In order for the misconfiguration to be exploited, an attacker would have to align a series of events in close coordination:
When you’re trying to sign into an account on your device, you are normally asked to press the button on your BLE security key to activate it. An attacker in close physical proximity at that moment in time can potentially connect their own device to your affected security key before your own device connects. In this set of circumstances, the attacker could sign into your account using their own device if the attacker somehow already obtained your username and password and could time these events exactly.
Before you can use your security key, it must be paired to your device. Once paired, an attacker in close physical proximity to you could use their device to masquerade as your affected security key and connect to your device at the moment you are asked to press the button on your key. After that, they could attempt to change their device to appear as a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse and potentially take actions on your device.
This security issue does not affect the primary purpose of security keys, which is to protect you against phishing by a remote attacker. Security keys remain the strongest available protection against phishing; it is still safer to use a key that has this issue, rather than turning off security key-based two-step verification (2SV) on your Google Account or downgrading to less phishing-resistant methods (e.g. SMS codes or prompts sent to your device). This local proximity Bluetooth issue does not affect USB or NFC security keys.
Am I affected?
This issue affects the BLE version of Titan Security Keys. To determine if your key is affected, check the back of the key. If it has a “T1” or “T2” on the back of the key, your key is affected by the issue and is eligible for free replacement.
Steps to protect yourself
If you want to minimize the remaining risk until you receive your replacement keys, you can perform the following additional steps:
iOS devices:
On devices running iOS version 12.2 or earlier, we recommend using your affected security key in a private place where a potential attacker is not within close physical proximity (approximately 30 feet). After you’ve used your key to sign into your Google Account on your device, immediately unpair it. You can use your key in this manner again while waiting for your replacement, until you update to iOS 12.3.
Once you update to iOS 12.3, your affected security key will no longer work. You will not be able to use your affected key to sign into your Google Account, or any other account protected by the key, and you will need to order a replacement key. If you are already signed into your Google Account on your iOS device, do not sign out because you won’t be able to sign in again until you get a new key. If you are locked out of your Google Account on your iOS device before your replacement key arrives, see these instructions for getting back into your account. Note that you can continue to sign into your Google Account on non-iOS devices..
On Android and other devices:
We recommend using your affected security key in a private place where a potential attacker is not within close physical proximity (approximately 30 feet). After you’ve used your affected security key to sign into your Google Account, immediately unpair it. Android devices updated with the upcoming June 2019 Security Patch Level (SPL) and beyond will automatically unpair affected Bluetooth devices, so you won’t need to unpair manually. You can also continue to use your USB or NFC security keys, which are supported on Android and not affected by this issue.
How to get a replacement key
We recommend that everyone with an affected BLE Titan Security Key get a free replacement by visiting google.com/replacemykey.
Is it still safe to use my affected BLE Titan Security Key?
It is much safer to use the affected key instead of no key at all. Security keys are the strongest protection against phishing currently available.
Human behavior has always intrigued me—that's the reason I studied psychology as an undergraduate. At the time, I wondered how those learnings could one day apply to life in the “real world.” As it turns out, an understanding of people and human behavior is an invaluable asset when it comes to cultivating influence—especially when it comes to design.
In my role as VP of User Experience (UX) Design at Google, I’m constantly tasked with influencing others. I lead a team of designers, researchers, writers and engineers who are behind products like Google’s Shopping, Trips, Payments and Ads. To create great experiences, we must first convince the people building these products that design is elemental to delivering not just user value, but also business value. Over the years I've seen how the ability to build influence is essential to designing the best experiences.
User empathy is a fast track to influence
As UX professionals (designers, writers, researchers and front-end engineers), it’s our job to fully grasp the needs of people using our products and be the spokesperson for them. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that we understand our users without witnessing them actually using our products, or to believe that our personal experiences reflect those of people everywhere. Yet every time I go out into the real world and spend time with people actually using our products, I come back with an unexpected insight that changes how I initially thought about a problem.
In 2017, I took a trip to Jakarta to research the challenges of using smartphones in a region where service is relatively expensive and bandwidth is not readily available. It wasn’t until I was on the ground that I realized how degraded the experience was from what I’d pictured. Similarly, during a recent trip to Tel Aviv, I learned how difficult it is to get funding and grow a business. Developing this kind of understanding, which can only come from experience, helps motivate you to fix a problem from a different angle.
Ideally, we’d bring all of our team members into the field to have these first-hand experiences, but that approach doesn’t scale. What does scale is empathy. We can share our personal experiences, research and user stories to build greater understanding. Once we’ve built a foundation of shared understanding, we can have better influence over decisions that affect users.
Understanding people's experiences and stories help build better products.
Inspire action with compelling stories
Research can provide the data and anecdotes that help others understand why your design meets a specific need, but how you present that data is equally important.
Creating rich stories full of photos and video clips helps expose others to how people use products and the challenges they encounter. On multiple occasions, I’ve been in a room where research clips of people interacting with a product or prototype are shared with executives and partners. Without fail, observing real people use products gets everyone animated and excited. Watching someone fumble through a task creates a sense of urgency to solve a problem that can’t be generated through data.
One way to do this is with prototyping software or animated slides that show a product flow or tell a narrative that helps people understand the pain points of a product or the ease of its well-designed experience. An interactive prototype lets people experience the full possibilities. If you’re lucky enough to work with a UX engineer, prototypes are probably already a part of your influence repertoire. There’s nothing better than prototyping and sharing a bold idea and hearing: “We need that! Let’s make it happen!”
Listen first
User experience is highly focused on empathy for users, yet we’re often so focused on people using our products that we don’t take the time to develop empathy for our colleagues. Making sure others feel seen, heard, and understood is a significant step toward influence. Similar to how we can mistakenly make assumptions about our users, we can fall into the same trap with our peers.
Too often people equate influence with asserting their perspective. Instead, influence starts with understanding the goals, motivations and frustrations of others.
It’s easy to make incorrect conclusions, so instead of rushing to make a point, start out by listening to your colleagues. Showing the courtesy of listening often begets reciprocity, and makes others more receptive to your perspective.
Our discipline is founded on exploring human connections and motivations through empathy and listening. Now you can use those tools to build influence, whether or not you work in UX.
