Tag Archives: developers

Introducing the Google Meet Live Sharing SDK

Posted by Mai Lowe, Product Manager & Ken Cenerelli, Technical Writer


The Google Meet Live Sharing SDK is in preview. To use the SDK, developers can apply for access through our Early Access Program.

Today at Google I/O 2022, we announced new functionality for app developers to leverage the Google Meet video conferencing product through our new Meet Live Sharing SDK. Users can now come together and share experiences with each other inside an app, such as streaming a TV show, queuing up videos to watch on YouTube, collaborating on a music playlist, joining in a dance party, or working out together though Google Meet. This SDK joins the large set of offerings available to developers under the Google Workspace Platform.

Partners like YouTube, Heads Up!, UNO!™ Mobile, and Kahoot! are already integrating our SDK into their applications so that their users can participate in these new, shared interactive experiences later this year.

Supports multiple use cases


The Live Sharing SDK allows developers to sync content across devices in real time and incorporate Meet into their apps, enabling them to bring new, fun, and genuinely connecting experiences to their users. It’s also a great way to reach new audiences as current users can introduce your app to friends and family.

The SDK supports two key use cases:
  • Co-Watching—Syncs streaming app content across devices in real time, and allows users to take turns sharing videos and playing the latest hits from their favorite artist. This allows for users to share controls such as starting and pausing a video, or selecting new content in the app.
  • Co-Doing—Syncs arbitrary app content, allowing users to get together to perform an activity like playing video games or follow the same workout regime.


The co-watching and co-doing APIs are independent but can be used in parallel with each other.


Example workflow illustration of a user starting live sharing within an app using the Live Sharing SDK.


Get started


To learn more, watch our I/O 2022 session on the Google Meet Live Sharing SDK and check out the documentation for the Android version.

If you want to try out the SDK, developers can apply for access through our Early Access Program.


What’s next?


We’re also continuing to improve features by working to build the video-content experience you want to bring to your users. For more announcements like this and for info about the Google Workspace Platform and APIs, subscribe to our developer newsletter.

Now in Developer Preview: Create Spaces and Add Members with the Google Chat API

Posted by Mike Rhemtulla, Product Manager & Charles Maxson, Developer Advocate

The Google Chat API updates are in developer preview. To use the API, developers can apply for access through our Google Workspace Developer Preview Program.

In Google Chat, Spaces serve as a central place for team collaboration—instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a meeting, teams can move conversations and collaboration into a space, giving everybody the ability to stay connected, reference team or project info and revisit work asynchronously.

Programmatically create and populate Google Chat spaces

We are pleased to announce that you can programmatically create new Spaces and add members on behalf of users, through the Google Workspace Developer Preview Program via the Google Chat API.

These latest additions to the Chat API unlock some sought after scenarios for developers looking to add new dimensions to how they can leverage Chat. For example, organizations that need to create Spaces based on various business needs will now be able to do so programmatically. This will open up the door for Chat solutions that can build out Spaces modeled to represent new teams, projects, working groups, or whatever the specific use case may be that can benefit from automatically creating new Spaces.

Coming soon, example from an early developer preview partner

One of our developer preview partners, PagerDuty, is already leveraging the API as part of their upcoming release of PagerDuty for Google Chat. The app will allow users of their incident management solution to take quick actions around an incident with the right team members needed. PagerDuty for Chat will allow the incident team to isolate and focus on the problem at hand without being distracted by having to set up a new space, or further distract any folks in the current space who aren’t a part of the resolution team for a specific incident. All of this will be done seamlessly through PagerDuty for Chat as part of the natural flow of working with Google Chat.

Example of how a Chat app with the new APIs can enable users to easily create new Spaces and add members to an incident.

Learn more and get started

As you can imagine, there are many use cases that show off the potential of what you can build with the Chat API and the new Create methods. Whether it’s creating Spaces with specified members or extending Chat apps that spawn off new collaboration Spaces for use with help desk, HR, sales, customer support or any endless number of scenarios, we encourage you to explore what you can do today.

How to get started:



Now in Developer Preview: Create Spaces and Add Members with the Google Chat API

Posted by Mike Rhemtulla, Product Manager & Charles Maxson, Developer Advocate

The Google Chat API updates are in developer preview. To use the API, developers can apply for access through our Google Workspace Developer Preview Program.

In Google Chat, Spaces serve as a central place for team collaboration—instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a meeting, teams can move conversations and collaboration into a space, giving everybody the ability to stay connected, reference team or project info and revisit work asynchronously.

Programmatically create and populate Google Chat spaces

We are pleased to announce that you can programmatically create new Spaces and add members on behalf of users, through the Google Workspace Developer Preview Program via the Google Chat API.

These latest additions to the Chat API unlock some sought after scenarios for developers looking to add new dimensions to how they can leverage Chat. For example, organizations that need to create Spaces based on various business needs will now be able to do so programmatically. This will open up the door for Chat solutions that can build out Spaces modeled to represent new teams, projects, working groups, or whatever the specific use case may be that can benefit from automatically creating new Spaces.

Coming soon, example from an early developer preview partner

One of our developer preview partners, PagerDuty, is already leveraging the API as part of their upcoming release of PagerDuty for Google Chat. The app will allow users of their incident management solution to take quick actions around an incident with the right team members needed. PagerDuty for Chat will allow the incident team to isolate and focus on the problem at hand without being distracted by having to set up a new space, or further distract any folks in the current space who aren’t a part of the resolution team for a specific incident. All of this will be done seamlessly through PagerDuty for Chat as part of the natural flow of working with Google Chat.

Example of how a Chat app with the new APIs can enable users to easily create new Spaces and add members to an incident.

Learn more and get started

As you can imagine, there are many use cases that show off the potential of what you can build with the Chat API and the new Create methods. Whether it’s creating Spaces with specified members or extending Chat apps that spawn off new collaboration Spaces for use with help desk, HR, sales, customer support or any endless number of scenarios, we encourage you to explore what you can do today.

How to get started:



Building better products for new internet users

Since the launch of Google’s Next Billion Users (NBU) initiative in 2015, nearly 3 billion people worldwide came online for the very first time. In the next four years, we expect another 1.2 billion new internet users, and building for and with these users allows us to build better for the rest of the world.

For this year’s I/O, the NBU team has created sessions that will showcase how organizations can address representation bias in data, learn how new users experience the web, and understand Africa’s fast-growing developer ecosystem to drive digital inclusion and equity in the world around us.

We invite you to join these developers sessions and hear perspectives on how to build for the next billion users. Together, we can make technology helpful, relevant, and inclusive for people new to the internet.

Session: Building for everyone: the importance of representative data

Mike Knapp, Hannah Highfill and Emila Yang from Google’s Next Billion Users team, in partnership with Ben Hutchinson from Google’s Responsible AI team, will be leading a session on how to crowdsource data to build more inclusive products.

Data gathering is often the most overlooked aspect of AI, yet the data used for machine learning directly impacts a project’s success and lasting potential. Many organizations—Google included—struggle to gather the right datasets required to build inclusively and equitably for the next billion users. “We are going to talk about a very experimental product and solution to building more inclusive technology,” says Knapp of his session. “Google is testing a paid crowdsourcing app [Task Mate] to better serve underrepresented communities. This tool enables developers to reach ‘crowds’ in previously underrepresented regions. It is an incredible step forward in the mission to create more inclusive technology.”

Bookmark this session to your I/O developer profile.

Session: What we can learn from the internet’s newest users

“The first impression that your product makes matters,” says Nicole Naurath, Sr. UX Researcher - Next Billion Users at Google. “It can either spark curiosity and engagement, or confuse your audience.”

Everyday, thousands of people are coming online for the first time. Their experience can be directly impacted by how familiar they are with technology. People with limited digital experience, or novice internet users, experience the web differently and sometimes developers are not used to building for them. Design elements such as images, icons, and colors play a key role in digital experience. If images are not relatable, icons are irrelevant, and colors are not grounded in cultural context, the experience can confuse anyone, especially someone new to the internet.

Nicole Naurath and Neha Malhotra, from Google’s Next Billion Users team, will be leading the session on what we can learn from the internet’s newest users, how users experience the web and share a framework for evaluating products that work for novice internet users.”

Bookmark this session to your I/O developer profile.

Session: Africa’s booming developer ecosystem

Software developers are the catalyst for digital transformation in Africa. They empower local communities, spark growth for businesses, and drive innovation in a continent which more than 1.3 billion people call home. Demand for African developers reached an all-time high last year, driven by both local and remote opportunities, and is growing even faster than the continent's developer population.

Andy Volk and John Kimani from the Developer and Startup Ecosystem team in Sub-Saharan Africa will share findings from the Africa Developer Ecosystem 2021 report.

In their words, “This session is for anyone who wants to find out more about how African developers are building for the world or who is curious to find out more about this fast-growing opportunity on the continent. We are presenting trends, case studies and new research from Google and its partners to illustrate how people and organizations are coming together to support the rapid growth of the developer ecosystem.”

Bookmark this session to your I/O developer profile.

To learn more about Google’s Next Billion Users initiative, visit nextbillionusers.google

Women Techmakers expands online safety education

Online violence against women goes beyond the internet. It impacts society and the economy at large. It leads to damaging economic repercussions, due to increased medical costs and lost income for victims. It impacts the offline world, with seven percent of women changing jobs due to online violence, and one in ten experiencing physical harm due to online threats, according to Google-supported research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2020.

That’s why the Women Techmakers program, which provides visibility, community and resources for women in technology, supports online safety education for women and allies. Google community manager Merve Isler, who lives in Turkey and leads Women Techmakers efforts in Turkey, Central Asia and the Caucasus region, organized the first-ever women’s online safety hackathon in Turkey in 2020, which expanded to a full week of trainings and ideathons in 2021. Google community manager and Women Techmakers manager Hufsa Manawar brought online safety training to Pakistan in early 2022.

Now, Women Techmakers is providing a more structured way for women around the world to learn about online safety, in the form of a free online learning module, launched in April 2022, in honor of International Women’s Day. To create this module, I worked with my co-host Alana Fromm from Jigsaw and our teams to create a series of videos covering different topics related to women’s online safety. Jigsaw is a unit within Google that explores threats to open society and builds technological solutions.

In the online training, we begin by defining online violence and walking through the ways negative actors threaten women online, which include misinformation and defamation, cyberharassment and hate speech. Regardless of the tactic, the goal remains the same: to threaten and harass women into silence. We break down the groups of people involved in online harassment and the importance of surrounding oneself with allies.

In one of the videos in the series, Women Techmakers Ambassador Esrae Abdelnaby Hassan shares her story of online abuse. She was exploring learning cybersecurity when a mentor she trusted gave her USB drives with courses and reading material that were infected with viruses and allowed him to take control of her computer and record videos. Then, he blackmailed her, using the videos he’d taken as threats. She felt afraid and isolated, and relied on her family for support as she addressed the harassment.

The learning module provides two codelabs, one on steps you can take to protect yourself online, and one on Perspective API, a free, open-source product built by Jigsaw and the Counter Abuse security team at Google. The first codelab provides practical guidance, and the second codelab walks viewers through the process of installing Perspective API, which uses machine learning to identify toxic comments.

We look forward to seeing the impact of our new, easy-to-access online training, as well as what our ambassadors are able to accomplish offline as the year progresses.

How GDSC students are using their skills to support communities in Ukraine

Posted by Laura Cincera, Program Manager Google Developer Student Clubs, Europe

Revealing character in moments of crisis

The conflict in Ukraine is a humanitarian crisis that presents complex challenges. During this time of uncertainty, communities of student developers are demonstrating extraordinary leadership skills and empathy as they come together to support those affected by the ongoing situation. Student Patricijia Čerkaitė and her Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) community at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands organized Code4Ukraine, an international hackathon that brought diverse groups of over 80 student developers together on March 3-4, 2022, to develop technology solutions to support people affected by the conflict in Ukraine.

Even far from the conflict in the Netherlands, they felt compelled to make an impact. “I have relatives in Ukraine; they live in Crimea,” says Patricijia. “In my childhood, I used to spend summer holidays there, eating ice cream and swimming in the Black Sea.”

Patricijia sitting at desk in black chair looking back and smiling

Patricijia working on the details for Code4Ukraine.

Rushing to help others in need with technology

Time was of the essence. The organizing team in Eindhoven contacted other students, connected with communities near and far, and sprang into action. The team invited Ukrainian Google Developer Expert Artem Nikulchenko to share his technology knowledge and first-hand experience of what is happening in his country. Students discussed issues faced by Ukrainians, reviewed problems citizens faced, and ideated around technology-centric solutions. Feelings of exasperation, frustration, and most importantly, hope became lines of code. Together, students built solutions to answer the call: Code4Ukraine.

Blue and yellow emblem that says Code 4 Ukraine

Then, gradually, through a collaborative effort, problem solving, and hours of hard work, the winners of the Code4Ukraine Hackathon emerged: Medicine Warriors, a project built by a diverse, cross-cultural group of undergraduate students and IT professionals from Ukraine, Poland, and Georgia, aiming to address the insulin shortage in Ukraine. The project gathers publicly available data from Ukrainian government notices on insulin availability across Ukraine and presents it in an easily readable way.

Photograph of the Medicine Warriors application design

Photograph of the Medicine Warriors application design

Helping: at the heart of their community

One member of the winning team is the GDSC chapter lead at the National Technical University of Ukraine Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Ekaterina Gricaenko. “In Ukraine, there is a saying: ‘друг пізнається в біді,’ which translates to, ‘you will know who your friends are when the rough times arrive,’” says Ekaterina. “And now, I can say that the GDSC community is definitely on my family list.”

Photograph of Ekaterina Gricaenko, GDSC Lead

Ekaterina Gricaenko, GDSC Lead, Kyiv Polytechnic Institute

The Code4Ukraine initiative's goal of bringing others together to make an impact offers a prime example of what the Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) program aims to achieve: empowering student developers in universities to impact their communities through technology.

Reflecting on her experience leading the Kyiv GDSC chapter, Ekaterina says, “I started my journey with GDSC as a Core Team member, and during that time, I fell in love with our community, goals, and key concepts. Then, I decided to become a lead, to share my enthusiasm and support students as they pursue their professional dreams.

The Kyiv GDSC has organized over 18 workshops, written over 200 articles, run multiple study groups, and reached over a thousand followers on social media. “It’s incredible to realize how far we have come,” Ekaterina says.

A visual collage displays multiple activities organized by GDSC KPI

A visual collage displays multiple activities organized by GDSC KPI, led by Ekaterina Gricaenko.

Getting involved in your community

Through efforts like Code4Ukraine and other inspiring solutions like the 2022 Solution Challenge, students globally are giving communities hope as they tackle challenges and propose technical solutions. By joining a GDSC, students can grow their knowledge in a peer-to-peer learning environment and put theory into practice by building projects that solve for community problems and make a significant impact.

Photo of students in class in the upper right hand corner with a sign in the center that says Become a leader at your university

Learn more about Google Developer Student Clubs

If you feel inspired to make a positive change through technology, applications for GDSC leads for the upcoming 2022-2023 academic year are now open. Students can apply at goo.gle/gdsc-leads. If you’re passionate about technology and are ready to use your skills to help your student developer community, then you should consider becoming a Google Developer Student Clubs Lead!

We encourage all interested students to apply here and submit their applications as soon as possible. The applications in Europe will be open until 31st May 2022.

Meet 11 startups working to combat climate change

We believe that technology and entrepreneurship can help avert the world’s climate crisis. Startup founders are using tools — from machine learning to mobile platforms to large scale data processing — to accelerate the change to a low-carbon economy. As part ofGoogle’s commitment to address climate change, we’ll continue to invest in the technologists and entrepreneurs who are working to build climate solutions.

So this Earth Day, we’re announcing the second Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change cohort. This ten-week program consists of intensive workshops and expert mentorship designed to help growth-stage, sustainability-focused startups learn technical, product and leadership best practices. Meet the 11 selected startups using technology to better our planet:

  • AmpUpin Cupertino, California: AmpUp is an electric vehicle (EV) software company and network provider that helps drivers, hosts, and fleets to charge stress-free.
  • Carbon Limitin Boca Raton, Florida: Carbon Limit transforms concrete into a CO2 sponge with green cement nanotechnology, turning roads and buildings into permanent CO2 solutions.
  • ChargeNet Stationsin Los Angeles, California: ChargeNet Stations aims to make charging accessible and convenient in all communities, preventing greenhouse gas emissions through use of PV + storage.
  • ChargerHelp!In Los Angeles, California: ChargerHelp! provides on-demand repair of electric vehicle charging stations, while also building out local workforces, removing barriers and creating economic mobility within all communities.
  • CO-Zin Boulder, Colorado: CO-Z accelerates electricity decarbonization and empowers renters, homeowners and businesses with advanced control, automated savings and power failure protection.
  • Community Energy Labsin Portland, Oregon: Community Energy Labs uses artificial intelligence to make smart energy management and decarbonization both accessible and affordable for community building owners.
  • Moment Energyin Vancouver, British Columbia: Moment Energy repurposes retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries to provide clean, affordable and reliable energy storage.
  • Mi Terroin City of Industry, California: Mi Terro is a synthetic biology and advanced material company that creates home compostable, plastic-alternative biomaterials made from plant-based agricultural waste.
  • Nithioin Washington, DC: Nithio is an AI-driven platform for clean energy investment that standardizes credit risk to catalyze capital to address climate change and achieve universal energy access.
  • Re Companyin New York City, New York: Re Company is a reusable packaging subscription service that supplies reuse systems with optimally designed containers and cycles them back into the supply chain at end of life.
  • Understoryin Pacific Grove, California: Understory rapidly monitors and quantifies discrete landscape changes to mitigate the effects of environmental change and deliver actionable information for land management, habitat conservation and climate risk assessment.

When the program kicks off this summer, startups will receive mentoring and technical support tailored to their business through a mix of one-to-one and one-to-many learning sessions, both remotely and in-person, from Google engineers and external experts. Stay tuned on Google for Startups social channels to see their experience unfold over the next three months.

Learn more about Google for Startups Accelerator here, and the latest on Google’s commitment to sustainability here.

Machine Learning Communities: Q1 ‘22 highlights and achievements

Posted by Nari Yoon, Hee Jung, DevRel Community Manager / Soonson Kwon, DevRel Program Manager

Let’s explore highlights and accomplishments of vast Google Machine Learning communities over the first quarter of the year! We are enthusiastic and grateful about all the activities that the communities across the globe do. Here are the highlights!

ML Ecosystem Campaign Highlights

ML Olympiad is an associated Kaggle Community Competitions hosted by Machine Learning Google Developers Experts (ML GDEs) or TensorFlow User Groups (TFUGs) sponsored by Google. The first round was hosted from January to March, suggesting solving critical problems of our time. Competition highlights include Autism Prediction Challenge, Arabic_Poems, Hausa Sentiment Analysis, Quality Education, Good Health and Well Being. Thank you TFUG Saudi, New York, Guatemala, São Paulo, Pune, Mysuru, Chennai, Bauchi, Casablanca, Agadir, Ibadan, Abidjan, Malaysia and ML GDE Ruqiya Bin Safi, Vinicius Fernandes Caridá, Yogesh Kulkarni, Mohammed buallay, Sayed Ali Alkamel, Yannick Serge Obam, Elyes Manai, Thierno Ibrahima DIOP, Poo Kuan Hoong for hosting ML Olympiad!

Highlights and Achievements of ML Communities

TFUG organizer Ali Mustufa Shaikh (TFUG Mumbai) and Rishit Dagli won the TensorFlow Community Spotlight award (paper and code). This project was supported by provided Google Cloud credit.

ML GDE Sachin Kumar (Qatar) posted Build a retail virtual agent from scratch with Dialogflow CX - Ultimate Chatbot Tutorials. In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a chatbot and voice bot from scratch using Dialogflow CX, a Conversational AI Platform (CAIP) for building conversational UIs.

ML GDE Ngoc Ba (Vietnam) posted MTet: Multi-domain Translation for English and Vietnamese. This project is about how to collect high quality data and train a state-of-the-art neural machine translation model for Vietnamese. And it utilized Google Cloud TPU, Cloud Storage and related GCP products for faster training.

Kaggle announced the Google Open Source Prize early this year (Winners announcement page). In January, ML GDE Aakash Kumar Nain (India)’s Building models in JAX - Part1 (Stax) was awarded.

In February, ML GDE Victor Dibia (USA)’s notebook Signature Image Cleaning with Tensorflow 2.0 and ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) & Soumik Rakshit’s notebook gaugan-keras were awarded.

TFUG organizer Usha Rengaraju posted Variable Selection Networks (AI for Climate Change) and Probabilistic Bayesian Neural Networks using TensorFlow Probability notebooks on Kaggle. They both got gold medals, and she has become a Triple GrandMaster!

TFUG Chennai hosted the two events, Transformers - A Journey into attention and Intro to Deep Reinforcement Learning. Those events were planned for beginners. Events include introductory sessions explaining the transformers research papers and the basic concept of reinforcement learning.

ML GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid (USA), Nived P A, and Joel Shor posted Our Summer of Code Project on TF-GAN. This article describes enhancements made to the TensorFlow GAN library (TF-GAN) of the last summer.

ML GDE Aakash Nain (India) released a series of tutorials about building models in JAX. In the second tutorial, Aakash uses one of the most famous and most widely used high-level libraries for Jax to build a classifier. In the notebook, you will be taking a deep dive into Flax, too.

ML GDE Bhavesh Bhatt (India) built a model for braille to audio with 95% accuracy. He created a model that translates braille to text and audio, lending a helping hand to people with visual disabilities.

ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) recently wrote Publishing ConvNeXt Models on TensorFlow Hub. This is a contribution from the 30 versions of the model, ready for inference and transfer learning, with documentation and sample code. And he also posted First Steps in GSoC to encourage the fellow ML GDEs’ participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

ML GDE Merve Noyan (Turkey) trained 40 models on keras.io/examples; built demos for them with Streamlit and Gradio. And those are currently being hosted here. She also held workshops entitled NLP workshop with TensorFlow for TFUG Delhi, TFUG Chennai, TFUG Hyderabad and TFUG Casablanca. It covered the basic to advanced topics in NLP right from Transformers till model hosting in Hugging Face, using TFX and TF Serve.

Women Techmakers educate India’s next generation

Women Techmakers Ambassador Dhivya Krishna estimates she’s taught about 5,000 students in India about technology. Dhivya has co-organized two WTM chapters, WTM Coimbatore from 2018-2021 and WTM Chennai since 2021. She has also co-led two Google Developer Group (GDG) chapters, GDG Coimbatore from 2017-2021 and GDG Chennai since 2021.

Dhivya, a writer and life skills educator based in Chennai, was planning her Women Techmakers chapter’s International Women’s Day 2022 events. She noted underprivileged children in Chennai were fairly unaware of technology and how tech skills could benefit their lives and future employment prospects. So Dhivya launched a program for girls in several grammar schools and communities in outer Chennai.

“I wanted to bring awareness of technology to these girls–future CEOs, software developers and marketers, and International Women’s Day was the right time to do it,” says Dhivya, who will complete her Master’s in psychology this year.

Shilpa Garg, community manager for Google Developers Group (GDG) and Women Techmakers in India, was excited to hear about Dhivya’s plan, and she immediately secured support from the region and the Google team.

The two-day educational program taught girls ages 11-17 the basics of computers and technology. Topics included basic information like what the internet is, how Google Search and Docs work, and more complicated subjects like cybersecurity. At the end of each session, volunteers spent ten minutes teaching about women’s health.

A photo of Dhivya Krishna and another WTM Chennai volunteer talking with girls in Chennai about technology as part of International Women’s Day 2022.

“Our 17 volunteers, who were half women and half men, put their hearts and souls into creating presentations for young children,” says Dhivya. “I could see the girls getting inspired, watching our female volunteers express the significance of technology in their lives.”

A photo of girls in Chennai participating in a technology program as part of International Women’s Day 2022.

“It takes a lot of effort to organize an initiative like this,” adds Prasad Seth, a community manager for Google Developer Groups in India. “For girls in the villages in India, access to technology and education can open up a world of opportunity. Events like this help with Indian social mobility, improve gender equality, and are the beginning of breaking barriers and making progress for women.”

Photos of the GDG and Women Techmakers Chennai volunteers teaching technology to girls in the community.
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