Tag Archives: developers

Building a more private web

Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do. So today, we are announcing a new initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this a Privacy Sandbox. 


Technology that publishers and advertisers use to make advertising even more relevant to people is now being used far beyond its original design intent - to a point where some data practices don’t match up to user expectations for privacy. Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.


First, large scale blocking of cookies undermine people’s privacy by encouraging opaque techniques such as fingerprinting. With fingerprinting, developers have found ways to use tiny bits of information that vary between users, such as what device they have or what fonts they have installed to generate a unique identifier which can then be used to match a user across websites. Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think this subverts user choice and is wrong.


Second, blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers’ primary means of funding, which jeopardizes the future of the vibrant web. Many publishers have been able to continue to invest in freely accessible content because they can be confident that their advertising will fund their costs. If this funding is cut, we are concerned that we will see much less accessible content for everyone. Recent studies have shown that when advertising is made less relevant by removing cookies, funding for publishers falls by 52% on average1.


So we are doing something different. We want to find a solution that both really protects user privacy and also helps content remain freely accessible on the web. At I/O, we announced a plan to improve the classification of cookies, give clarity and visibility to cookie settings, as well as plans to more aggressively block fingerprinting. We are making progress on this, and today we are providing more details on our plans to restrict fingerprinting. Collectively we believe all these changes will improve transparency, choice, and control. 


But, we can go further. Starting with today’s announcements, we will work with the web community to develop new standards that advance privacy, while continuing to support free access to content. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve started sharing our preliminary ideas for a Privacy Sandbox - a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy. Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users, but user data shared with websites and advertisers would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user information, and keeping much more user information on-device only. Our goal is to create a set of standards that is more consistent with users’ expectations of privacy.


We are following the web standards process and seeking industry feedback on our initial ideas for the Privacy Sandbox. While Chrome can take action quickly in some areas (for instance, restrictions on fingerprinting) developing web standards is a complex process, and we know from experience that ecosystem changes of this scope take time. They require significant thought, debate, and input from many stakeholders, and generally take multiple years. 


To move things forward as quickly as possible, we have documented the specific problems we are trying to solve together, and we are sharing a series of explainers with the web community. We have also summarized these ideas today on the Chromium blog.


We look forward to getting feedback on this approach from the web platform community, including other browsers, publishers, and their advertising partners. Thank you in advance for your help and input on this process - we believe that we must solve these problems together to ensure that the incredible benefits of the open, accessible web continue into the next generation of the internet.

1 Google Ad Manager data; n=500 global publishers; Analysis based on an A/B experiment where cookies are disabled on a randomly selected fraction of each publisher's traffic; May-August 2019. More information available on the Google ads blog.


Developer Student Clubs: A Walk That Changed Healthcare

Posted by Erica Hanson, Program Manager

ARUA, UGANDA - Samuel Mugisha is a 23 year old university student with a laugh that echoes off every wall and a mind determined to make change. Recently he heard from a healthcare worker that many children at a local clinic were missing vaccinations, so he decided to take a walk. He toured his community, neighbor to neighbor, and asked one simple question: “Can I see your vaccination card?”

In response he was given dirt stained, wrinkled, torn pieces of paper, holding life or death information - all written in scribble.

He squinted, held the cards to the light, rubbed them on his pant leg, but for no use. They were impossible to read. As Samuel put it, “They were broken.”

From the few cards he could read, Samuel noted children who had missed several vaccinations - they were unknowingly playing the odds, waiting to see if disease would find them.

“Looking through the cards, you could tell these kids had missed several vaccinations.”

Without hesitation, Samuel got right to work, determined to fix the healthcare system with technology.

He first brought together his closest friends from Developer Student Clubs (DSC), a program supporting students impacting their communities through tech. He asked them: “Why can’t technology solve our problem?”

Team photo of Developer Student Club

This newly formed team, including Samuel, Joshwa Benkya and Norman Acidri, came up with a twofold plan:

  1. Create a mobile app to replace the broken cards, so healthcare workers can clearly track which vaccines their young patients have received.
  2. Create a notification to alert healthcare workers when a child is due for a new vaccination.

The idea came together right as Developer Student Clubs launched its first Solution Challenge, an open call for all members to submit projects they recently imagined. These young developers had to give it a shot. They created a model, filled out an application, and pitched the idea. After waiting a month, they heard back - their team won the competition! Their idea was selected from a pool of 170 applicants across India, Africa, and Indonesia. In other words, everything was about to change.

In a country where talent can go unnoticed and problems often go unsolved, this new team had pushed through the odds. Developer Student Clubs is a platform for these types of bold thinkers. Students who view the issues of their region not simply as obstacles to overcome, but chances to mend their home, build a better life for themselves, and transform the experiences of their people.

The goal of the Solution Challenge, and all other DSC programs, is to educate young developers early and equip them with the right skills to make an impact in their community.

In this case, office space in Uganda was expensive and hard to find. Samuel’s team previously had few chances to all work under the same roof. After winning the challenge, Developer Student Clubs helped them find a physical space of their own to come together and collaborate - a simple tool, but one that led to a turning point. As Samuel described it,

“Developer Student Clubs helped us not be alone and apart from each other while trying to solve this problem. They gave us the space to come together and learn. We could all be in the same room, thinking together.”

Image of developers in classroom

With this new space to work, DSC then brought some of Africa’s best Google Developer Group Leads directly to the young developers. In these meetings, the students were given high-level insights on how to best leverage Android, Firebase, and Presto to propel their product forward. As Samuel put it:

“If we wanted to learn something, they gave us the best expert.”

As a result, the team realized that with the scarcity of internet in Uganda, Firebase was the perfect technology to build with - allowing healthcare workers to use the app offline but “check in” and receive updates when they were able to find internet.

Although the app has made impressive strides since winning the competition, this young team knows they can make it even better. They want to improve its usability by implementing more visuals and are working to create a version for parents, so families can track the status of their child’s vaccination on their own.

While there is plenty of work ahead, with these gifted students and Developer Student Clubs taking each step forward together, any challenge seems solvable.

What has the team been up to recently? From August 5th-9th they attended the Startup Africa Roadtrip, an intensive training week on how best to refine a startup business model.

Flutter Create’s big winner is a self-taught “beginner”

When Zebiao Hu found out he won the $10,000 Flutter Create grand prize, he didn't even tell his own wife. She learned about it through his posts on social media. He says he didn’t boast about his big win because he still sees himself as a beginner: He taught himself Flutter just weeks before the deadline, and created a compass app that won him the big prize. 

Flutter is Google's toolkit for building beautiful apps that run on your mobile phone, laptop and web browser from the same code (instead of having to write a different app for each device, as is common today). When Google announced Flutter Create, the contest attracted attention from developers all over the world. We received nearly a thousand submissions from 60+ countries and regions, including entries from both first-time coders and Flutter experts. The contest challenged developers to build something interesting, inspiring, and beautiful with Flutter using five kilobytes or less of Dart code. That’s a tiny amount of space: to put it into perspective, that’s less than half a second of a typical digital music file.

Flutter Create highlights

Highlights from the hundreds of submissions we received.

As a coder working in Shenzhen, China, Zebiao decided to learn about mobile development, because the industry was heading in a “mobile-first direction.” He bought books about Flutter and Dart in Chinese, and started to learn during the spring of 2019. Flutter Create was less than one month away.

Zebiao is no stranger to teaching himself how to code, though. In high school, he spent days and nights in the computer room, taking up coding because of his love of video games. After becoming an accomplished player, he began to wonder, "How are these games developed? Could I make one myself?"

Zebiao Hu, Flutter Create winner

Zebiao in the park where he usually jogs.

But, at that time, information about programming was hard to get and, for a high school student, difficult to learn. Luckily, Zebiao discovered a box of CDs, with one called “Programming.” His hobby turned into a career. As an early adopter, he became well known in local software circles, and was often approached to collaborate on projects. Customers became frequent customers, and then friends, bringing even more projects to him. 

Eventually, Zebiao got married and became the father of two children. Every day, he sends his children to school, and goes home to work. In the evening, he ends his work day and picks the kids up.

He says when he’s not working, he’s “running, drinking tea, and spending the weekend with my children at the amusement park.” And he’ll still take time to play the video games he played 15 or 20 years ago. 

Zebiao Hu, Flutter Create winner, made a compass app

The compass app did not feature a globe at first. 

When he set out to build his compass app, Zebiao found useful materials on Flutter’s official  website, Flutter’s Youtube channel and from Flutter Chinese online communities. He didn’t aim for the prize because he hadn’t been using Flutter for long, but instead entered to test his knowledge. 

He started the new project on March 15, only three weeks from April 7, the final submission date for Flutter Create. After the first version of the app was completed, the code was less than 5KB, but Zebiao was not satisfied, because it lacked an interesting visual. "It was boring to read the latitude and longitude in text form," he says. So he decided to upgrade the design to display the data using an interactive globe.

There was only one small problem: he had never programmed an animation before.

“Honestly, I learned everything from scratch,” Zebiao says. “After all, I had never used these tools before.” 

Finally, two days before the deadline, Zebiao successfully submitted his compass application.

Zebiao Hu's app

 Zebiao learned how to make his app from scratch. 

Zebiao says he doesn’t want to give advice to Flutter beginners, because he sees himself as a beginner, too. But he urged people to keep learning, even if their projects don’t use Flutter yet, and to find their own community of developers to share resources. And he says it’s important to stay open to whenever an idea strikes. “Keep a notebook with you,” he says. “Write down your thoughts, ideas or problems whenever possible. And try to solve them later.” 

Step up your interviewing game with Byteboard

I’ve worked as a software engineer on Google products like Photos and Maps for four years. But if you asked me to interview for a new role today, I doubt most technical interviews would accurately measure my skills. I would need to find time to comb through my college computer science books, practice coding theory problems like implementing linked lists or traversing a graph, and be prepared to showcase this knowledge on a whiteboard. 

According to a survey we conducted of over 2,500 working software engineers, nearly half of the respondents spent more than 15 hours studying for their technical interviews. Unfortunately, many companies still interview engineers in a way that's entirely disjointed from day-to-day engineering work—valuing access to the time and resources required to prepare over actual job-related knowledge and skills.

As a result, the tech interview process is often inefficient for companies, which sink considerable engineering resources into a process that yields very little insight, and frustrating for candidates, who aren't able to express their full skill-set. 

At Byteboard, a project built inside of Area 120 (Google’s workshop for experimental projects), we’ve redesigned the technical interview experience to be more effective, efficient and equitable for all. Our project-based interview assesses for engineering skills that are actually used on the job. The structured, identity-blind evaluation process enables hiring managers to reliably trust our recommendations, so they have to conduct fewer interviews before reaching a confident hiring decision. For candidates, this means they get to work through the design and implementation of a real-world problem in a real-world coding environment on their own time, without the stress of going through high-pressured theoretical tests. 

An effective interview to assess for on-the-job skills

Byteboard creates more effective technical interviews

We built the Byteboard interview by pairing our software engineering skills analysis with extensive academic research on assessment theory and inclusion best practices. Our interview assesses for skills like problem solving, role-related computer science knowledge, code fluency, growth mindset and interpersonal interaction. Byteboard evaluators—software engineers with up to 15+ years of experience—are trained to objectively review each anonymized interview for the presence of 20+ essential software engineering skills, which are converted into a skills profile for each candidate using clear and well-defined rubrics. 

By providing a more complete understanding of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses across a range of skills, Byteboard enables hiring managers and recruiters to make data-backed hiring decisions. Early tester Betterment saw their onsite-to-offer rates significantly increase by using Byteboard, indicating its effectiveness at identifying strong candidates for the job.

A more efficient interview to save engineers time

Byteboard creates more efficient technical interviews

Byteboard offers an end-to-end service that includes developing, administering and evaluating the interviews, letting companies focus on meeting more potential candidates face-to-face and increasing the number of candidates they can interview. Our clients have replaced up to 100 percent of their pre-onsite interviews with the Byteboard interview, allowing them to redirect time toward recruiting candidates directly at places like conferences and college campuses.

An equitable interview format to reduce bias

Byteboard creates more equitable technical interviews

The Byteboard interview is designed to grant everyone, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, name, background or education, the same opportunity to demonstrate their skills. Traditional technical interviews tend to test for understanding of theoretical concepts, which often require a big investment of time or resources to study up on. This can create anxiety for candidates who may not have either of those to spare as they are looking for a new job. By focusing on engineering skills that are actually used on the job, Byteboard allows candidates to confidently show off their role-related skills in an environment that is less performative and more similar to how they typically work as engineers. 

I felt less anxious while doing the interview and it gave me the most complete view of my strengths and weaknesses than any other interview I've done. a recent candidate from Howard University
An applicant or recruiter using Byteboard

The Byteboard Assessment Development team of educators and software engineers develop challenging questions that are tested and calibrated among engineers across a wide range of demographics. Through Byteboard's anonymization and structured evaluation of the interviews, hiring managers can make decisions with confidence without relying on unconscious biases. 


With Byteboard, our ultimate goal is to make interviewing better for companies and candidates alike. Companies looking to improve their hiring process can get in touch at byteboard.dev.

.App: bringing more people online securely

A year ago, we launched .app, the first open top-level domain (TLD) with built-in security through HSTS preloading. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have registered .app domains, and we want to take a moment to celebrate them.  

People are making more websites and apps than ever before. A recent survey we conducted with The Harris Poll found that nearly half (48%) of U.S. respondents plan to create a website in the near future. And a lot of people, especially students, are already building on the web. Over a third (34%) of 16-24 year olds who’ve already created a website did so for a class project. 

Having a meaningful domain name helps students turn their projects into reality. Take Ludwik Trammer, creator of shrew.app, who said: “The site started as a project for my graduate Educational Technology class at Georgia Tech. Getting the perfect domain gave me the initial push to turn it into the real deal (instead of making a prototype, publishing a scientific paper on it, and forgetting it).”

Helping creators launch their sites securely

With so many new creators, it’s essential that everyone does their part to make the internet safer. That’s why Google Registry designed .app to be secure by default, meaning every website on .app requires a HTTPS connection to ensure a secure connection to the internet.

HTTPS helps keep you and your website visitors safe from bad actors, who may exploit connections that aren’t secure by:

  • intercepting or altering the site’s content

  • misdirecting traffic

  • spying on open Wi-Fi networks

  • injecting ad malware or tracking

“As a social application, data protection is paramount. As cyber attacks increase, the security benefits a .app domain brings was a key factor for us. We also believe that a .app domain is significantly more descriptive than a .com domain, meaning us Daneh Westropp
Founder, pickle.app

There's still work to  be done. One out of two people don’t know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Many major browsers (like Chrome) warn users in the URL bar when content is "not secure," but there’s every website creator still has a shared responsibility to keep their users safe.

.App is year in, and we’re happy to see so many people using it to build secure websites and connect with the world. You can read more stories from .app owners here and get your own .app name at get.app. If you’re one of the millions of people planning to build a website, we hope you’ll join us in making the internet safer and take the steps to securely launch your website.

.App: bringing more people online securely

Posted by Ben Fried, VP, CIO, & Chief Domains Enthusiast

Celebrating 100 of our favorite .app websites. See the list here.

A year ago, we launched .app, the first open top-level domain (TLD) with built-in security through HSTS preloading. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have registered .app domains, and we want to take a moment to celebrate them.

People are making more websites and apps than ever before. A recent survey we conducted with The Harris Poll found that nearly half (48%) of U.S. respondents plan to create a website in the near future. And a lot of people, especially students, are already building on the web. Over a third (34%) of 16-24 year olds who’ve already created a website did so for a class project.

Having a meaningful domain name helps students turn their projects into reality. Take Ludwik Trammer, creator of shrew.app, who said: “The site started as a project for my graduate Educational Technology class at Georgia Tech. Getting the perfect domain gave me the initial push to turn it into the real deal (instead of making a prototype, publishing a scientific paper on it, and forgetting it).”

Helping creators launch their sites securely

With so many new creators, it’s essential that everyone does their part to make the internet safer. That’s why Google Registry designed .app to be secure by default, meaning every website on .app requires a HTTPS connection to ensure a secure connection to the internet.

HTTPS helps keep you and your website visitors safe from bad actors, who may exploit connections that aren’t secure by:

  • intercepting or altering the site’s content
  • misdirecting traffic
  • spying on open Wi-Fi networks
  • injecting ad malware or tracking

“As a social application, data protection is paramount. As cyber attacks increase, the security benefits a .app domain brings was a key factor for us. We also believe that a .app domain is significantly more descriptive than a .com domain, meaning users can find us more easily! All in all it was a no brainer for us switching to .app.”

-Daneh Westropp, Founder, pickle.app

There's still work to be done. One out of two people don’t know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. Many major browsers (like Chrome) warn users in the URL bar when content is "not secure," but there’s every website creator still has a shared responsibility to keep their users safe.

.App is year in, and we’re happy to see so many people using it to build secure websites and connect with the world. You can read more stories from .app owners here and get your own .app name at get.app. If you’re one of the millions of people planning to build a website, we hope you’ll join us in making the internet safer and take the steps to securely launch your website.

10 lessons learned from Inspiration Sessions at I/O 2019

Google I/O didn’t just have developers in attendance. Rock stars, astronauts and Turing Award winners took the stage for more than a dozen Inspiration Sessions, in which attendees learned about how technology is shaping the future, from music to art to creativity. Here are just a few lessons learned from these talks:

The key to creativity is thinking like a child.Academy Award-winning animator Glen Keane created beloved characters like Ariel, The Beast and Pocahontas. He told attendees that no matter your line of work, it’s important to stay in touch with your inner child. “We all had that six-year-old kid that had something to do with who you are today and what you are doing,” he said. “Don’t forget that part of the adventure you had as a child.”

IO_19_Glen Keane.jpg

Glen Keane does a live drawing of The Beast from “Beauty and the Beast.”

If technology is the answer, what is the question?That’s the thesis behind the work of artist and researcher Sougwen Chung, who has programmed robots to collaborate with her to create artwork. She spoke alongside Cedric Kiefer, co-founder and creative lead of the art studio Onformative, and Kenric McDowell, co-leader of the Artist + Machine Intelligence program at Google Arts & Culture. The three talked about the relationship between artists and AI, and whether AI could fully replace artists. “It’s the question of how you actually use technology in your art, in your practice,” Cedric said. “Do you just write a little bit of code and press ‘art, art, art, more art?’ That’s not exactly how it is.”

Be audacious, and think bigger. Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first woman of color to go into space, leads 100 Year Starship, an initiative to make sure humans can travel to another star in the next century. “When you look at space exploration, the audacity of it makes a difference,” she said. “I don’t think Mars pushes us hard enough.” She was joined in the talk by Sheperd Doeleman, a Harvard astrophysicist who helped construct the first-ever photo of a black hole—an audacious project in itself.

IO_19_Astronaut Mae Jemison.jpg

Astronaut Mae Jemison.

Technology can push you to create new things. Claire Evans, the singer of the band YACHT, incorporated machine learning into the creation of their new album with help from Google’s Magenta, a research project that explores the role of ML in art. She used Magenta to create new melodies based on YACHT’s back catalog. “It forcibly pushed us outside of our comfort zone, and forced us to play differently and think differently about how we work,” she said. She was joined by Googlers Adam Roberts and Jesse Engel, who work on Magenta, as well as a surprise guest, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, who discussed how his band used Magenta for their I/O performance.

IO_19_Wayne Coyne_TheFlamingLips.jpg

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips.

AI can be used to fight climate change.Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder at DeepMind, is responsible for integrating its AI systems into Google products. He talked about how his team has made the energy from Google’s wind farms 20 percent more valuable, and has reduced energy use for Android phones. “Energy consumption is one of the largest contributors to climate change,” he said. “[We thought,] How could we as a team start to focus significant amounts of our effort on this really important problem?”

Space is full of wonder—and mystery, too. Famed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku spoke with inventor and entrepreneur Taylor Wilson about a wide range of topics, from string theory to multiverses to why he’s determined to complete Einstein’s theory of everything. He also weighed in on the recent first image of a black hole: “A black hole is a cosmic roach motel. Everything checks in, nothing checks out. But then the question is, where does all that stuff go?”

A feature may be a huge deal, even if you don’t use it.Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s senior vice president of Platforms & Ecosystems, sat down with writer and podcaster Florence Ion to share insights about the latest from Android, Chrome, Chrome OS and Google Play. And he weighed in on one of Android Q’s newest features: Dark Mode. “I will say, I’m personally not a huge Dark Mode person,” Hiroshi admitted. “I’m an outlier. But your feedback was heard.”

Different is the new normal.Elise Roy, an inclusive design strategist, struggled to prove she was “normal” after becoming deaf at age 10. Eventually she realized that small design changes can make a huge difference in her life. Something as small as a bright red hearing aid “created this huge shift in my life,” she said. “It allowed me to celebrate my difference and allowed others to join in.” Two Googlers, Michael Brenner and Irene Alvarado, also took the stage to discuss another inclusive project: Euphonia, an effort to help computers understand diverse speech patterns.

IO_19_Elise Roy.jpg

Elise Roy and an audience member demonstrate the “momentary disabilities” everyone faces from time to time.

The most brilliant AI is inspired by how the human brain functions.Geoffrey Hinton, Google Fellow and Turing Award winner, spoke with Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief of “Wired,” about why he kept working on neural nets when the rest of the AI community started to back away from the concept in the 90s: “You have two options. You can program it, or you can learn. This had to be the right way to go.” Although he says, “We are neural nets—anything we can do they can do,” he emphasized that he's not trying to recreate the brain, but instead “looking at the brain and saying, this thing works. If we want to make something else that works, let’s look at it for inspiration.”

Engineer for lasting innovation.Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, talked about the concept of lasting innovation and the role ethics and diversity of perspectives play. “The real issue is whether in the long-term society is happy with the thing that you put into society.” Astro emphasized that lasting innovation holds itself accountable to the communities in which it operates and society at large.

Count ‘em up: 100 things we announced at I/O ‘19

Another I/O is in the books! We played in sandboxes, watched eye-popping product demos and listened to AI-powered music. But the fun isn’t over! In case you missed it, here are 100 announcements we made at I/O:

Hardware

1. Hold the phone! Our new smartphones—the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL—hit the shelves this week, bringing together all the essential Google features at a lower price ($399 for the 5.6-inch display and $479 for the 6-inch model).
.2. Good things come in threes, like Pixel 3a’s color options. Choose from Purple-ish, Clearly White and Just Black.
3. And no matter what color your phone is, it has the same great Pixel camera. Capture shots in portrait mode and HDR+, or use Night Sight to take magical photos in low light (think outdoor concerts, swanky restaurants or night hikes with friends).
4. To add to the creativity, Time Lapse is coming to Pixel 3a. Soon you can capture an entire sunset within a few seconds of video.
5. All-day battery, baby! The Pixel 3a charges seven hours of battery life in 15 minutes and full battery can last up to 30 hours.
6. Squeeze the Pixel 3a to get the Google Assistant to send texts, find directions, set reminders and a lot more—simply by using your voice.
7. Hi, who’s there? The Google Assistant’s Call Screen feature (available in English in the U.S. and Canada) gives more information about who’s calling before you even answer your phone. Best of all, it helps save you from robocalls once and for all.
8. The Pixel 3a is protected against new threats with three years of security and operating system updates.
9. It also comes with the custom-built Titan M chip to help protect your most sensitive data.
10. All Pixel phones will get a preview of AR in Google Maps. So the next time you're getting around town, you can see walking directions overlaid on the world itself, rather than looking at a blue dot on a map.
11. Say hello to Google Nest. We’re bringing the Home products and Nest brand together to create a helpful home.
12. We welcomed the newest member of the Google Nest family: Google Nest Hub Max. Hub Max has a 10-inch screen, premium stereo sound, a camera with built-in Nest Cam features and the power of Google Assistant.
13. Live Albums on Nest Hub Max lets you select pictures of family and friends from your Google Photos to be displayed on the screen.
14. The built-in Nest Cam helps you keep an eye on things at home. You can turn the camera on when you’re away and check on things right from the Nest App on your phone.
15. The camera on Hub Max also lets you make video calls and leave personalized messages with Google’s video calling app, Duo.  
16. If you’re listening to music or watching a cooking tutorial, turn down the volume with a wave of your hand. With Gestures, you simply have to look at the Nest Hub Max and raise your hand to pause media.
17. The home view dashboard lets you control all your connected devices from one dashboard—and the Google Assistant now controls more than 30,000 smart devices from 3,500 brands.
18. Similar to Voice Match, you have the option to enable Nest Hub Max’s Face Match feature that recognizes who’s using the device and shares the most relevant information, like their calendar and estimated commute time.
19. We shared our new privacy commitments, explaining our security and privacy options for Google Nest products.
20. There’s a green light on the front of Hub Max that indicates when the camera is streaming. In addition, you have multiple controls to disable camera features, like the Nest Cam and Face Match.
21. Hub Max will be available in the U.S., U.K. and Australia this summer.
22. Google Nest Hub, formerly Google Home Hub, is now available in 12 more countries—Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain and Sweden.
23. And our prices are lower: Google Nest Hub available in the U.S. for $129, and starting today Google Home is $99 and Google Home Max is $299.

Assistant 

24. The Assistant is now on more than one billion devices, available in more than 30 languages across 80 countries.
25. The next generation Assistant will run on-device and answer queries up to 10 times faster, with almost zero latency. It will come to Pixel phones later this year.
26. Keep the conversation going. Now with Continued Conversation, you can make several requests in a row without having to say “Hey Google” each time.
27. We’re extending Duplex to the web to help you complete tasks faster. Just ask the Assistant, “Book a car with for my next trip,” and it will figure out the rest.
28. Sound the alarm! You can now stop a timer or alarm that you set on Google Home speakers and Smart Displays by simply saying, “stop.”
29. Help is on the way! With a new feature called Personal References, the Assistant will better understand you and reference to the important things in your life. Say you’ve told the Assistant which contact “Mom” is. You can then ask, “Hey Google, what’s the weather like at my mom’s house this weekend?” and get the answer without any additional details.
30. Choose your next recipe to try, event to attend or podcast to listen to with Picks for You. This Assistant feature draws from past searches and other contextual cues to give you more personalized results.
31. Over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to access all of the helpfulness of the Assistant directly within Waze.
32. Take advantage of Google Assistant Driving Mode when you’re behind the wheel. The new dashboard automatically starts when you’re driving and displays the most relevant activities like navigation, messaging, calling and media.
33. It’s easier to use the Assistant to control your car remotely, so you can adjust your car’s temperature, check your fuel level or make sure your doors are locked without leaving the house.
34. Control your Assistant data and make privacy choices that are right for you from the “You” tab in your Assistant settings.
35. Ever Googled a “how-to” question? We’re giving content creators easy-to-use developer tools so in the coming months when you ask, “Hey Google, how do I install a dog door?” you’ll get a helpful step-by-step experience from a trusted source like DIY Networks.
36. The Assistant can now help you do specific things in some of your favorite apps. For example, you can say, “Hey Google, start my run in Nike Run Club.”
37. Game makers can now take full advantage of developing for Smart Displays' interactive screens, so you'll start seeing more games that combine voice, visuals and touch.

AI and ML

38. And the winner is…we unveiled the 20 Google AI Impact Challenge grantees  who are using AI to address societal challenges.
39. We’ve made progress on flood forecasting in India. Now we can better use AI to predict flood timing, location and severity across 90 percent of India, and share that information with Google Public Alerts.
40. Two bands took the stage at I/O—with a little help from machine learning. Both YACHT and The Flaming Lips worked with Google engineers to create music with Magenta, our AI tool for artistic creativity
41. Check out our new PAIR Guidebook, an external toolkit that will help ML practitioners make better, user-centered decisions when building with AI.
42. We’re taking the same AI research that makes our products better and using it to enhance user privacy. Federated learning allows Google’s AI products to work better for you, and work better for everyone, without collecting raw data from your devices.

Google News and Search 

43. Now it’s easier to stay in the know. The technology that powers Full Coverage in Google News is coming to Search to better organize search results for news-related topics and give you the context you need to understand a story.  
44. When you search for a news topic, you’ll have the option to see different points of a story—from a timeline of events to the key people involved—and surface a breadth of content including articles, tweets and even podcasts.
45. In the coming months, we’ll start including podcasts in Google Search results so you can listen to podcasts directly from the search results page or save an episode for later.

Augmented Reality and Google Lens

46. Seeing is believing! Soon you’ll be able to view 3D objects right from Search and place them into your own space.
47. Lens now provides more visual answers by using AR to overlay useful information and content onto the things you see. For example, if you see a dish you’d like to cook in an upcoming issue of Bon Appetit magazine, you’ll be able to point your camera at a recipe and have the page come to life and show you exactly how to make it.
48. Lens can help you decide what to order. Just point your camera at the menu, and Lens highlights which dishes are popular, right on the menu. Tap on a dish to see photos and snippets of reviews from Google Maps.
49. Now, you can point your camera at text and Lens will automatically overlay the translation right on top of the original words—it works in more than 100 languages.
50. Say what? When you point your camera at text, Lens can now read it out loud. You can also tap on a specific word to search for its definition. This feature is launching first in Google Go, our Search app for first-time smartphone users.

Privacy 

51. You’ll start seeing your Google Account profile icon appear more prominently across all Google products, so takes just one tap to access your privacy and security settings.
52. Now we’re making it easier to manage your data in Maps, the Assistant and YouTube (coming soon). For example, you'll be able to review and delete your location activity data directly in Google Maps, and then quickly get back to your directions.
53. New auto-delete controls for Location History and Web & App Activity allow you to choose to automatically and continuously delete your data.
54. We’re expanding Incognito mode—the option in Chrome that clears your browsing history after every session—to more of our products, including Maps.
55. Thanks to federated learning, Gboard has improved predictive typing as well as emoji predictions across tens of millions of devices.
56. We’ve built security keys directly into your Android phone, giving you easier and more convenient protection against phishing attacks. This is rolling out to all devices running Android 7.0 and above.

Android

57. Android Q’s newest features are centered around innovation, security, privacy and digital wellbeing.
58. A new gesture-based navigation lets you easily move between tasks and utilize a bigger screen.
59. Android Q has tools for developers to build cool apps for foldable phones and 5G, opening up new possibilities for experiences like gaming on your device.
60. Live Caption will automatically caption media playing on your phone—like videos podcasts, audio messages, even stuff you record yourself—across any app.
61. Smart Reply is getting even smarter! Not only will your phone show suggested replies, it’ll also help you take action, like opening addresses from a text message in an app like Maps.
62. You asked, we listened! Android Q brings Dark Theme. You can activate in Settings, or by turning on Battery Saver.
63. We’re bringing privacy to the top level of Settings so you can find all the important controls in one place.
64. Android Q arms you with new permission controls so you can share your location (or not) with apps on your own terms.
65. Time for a time out? With the new Focus Mode, you can get things done without distraction, by selecting the apps you want to stay active and pausing everything you don't.
66. And to help children and families find a better balance with technology, we’re making Family Link part of every device that has Digital Wellbeing, starting with Android Q.
67. Signed, sealed, delivered! There’s a new way to deliver important updates. With Project Mainline, we can update core OS components without a full OS update.
68. All Android devices with Q—including phones, tablets, TVs, and Android Auto—are required to encrypt user data.
69. Some of these features are available today in Android Q Beta which is available on 15 devices from 12 manufacturers (in addition to all Pixel phones).
70. Android Q brings lots of new emoji, including 53 new non-binary designs for emoji that Unicode defines as "genderless.”
71. Buckle up! Android Auto’s new design coming out this summer will help you get on the road faster, show you useful information at a glance and simplify common tasks while driving.
72. Now media developers will be able to build new entertainment experiences for Android-powered infotainment systems.
73. With Tiles on Wear OS by Google you have more swipeable access to things right from your wrist like your goals, next event, weather forecast, heart rate and timer.
74. Android TV platform now has more than 140 pay TV partners, 6 of the 10 top smart TV OEMs using the Android TV platform; and more than 5,000 apps and games in its ecosystem.

Chrome

75. It’s now easier to share files between Linux, Android, and Chrome OS using file manager.
76. Android Studio on Chrome OS helps you optimize your apps for Chrome OS—directly on your Chromebook.
77. All Chromebooks launched this year will be Linux-ready right out of the box.
78. We have more user transparency and controls, like improved cookie controls and more restrictions for fingerprinting across the web.

Ads

79. With the option to bid on tROAS, advertisers will soon be able to automatically pay more for users who are likely to spend more in apps, and pay less for users likely to spend less.
80. We’re teaming up with eight agencies
https://blog.google/products/ads/google-io-ads-announcements/
—Vidmob, Consumer Acquisition, Bamboo, Apptamin, Webpals, Creadits, Kaizen Ad and Kuaizi—to provide advertisers end-to-end creative development and consultation services.
81. We’ll be expanding a new monetization program, called Open Bidding, to all publishers later this year so developers can automatically  maximize the value of every impression automatically.
82. New transparency tools across browsers
https://blog.google/products/ads/transparency-choice-and-control-digital-advertising/
will give people greater visibility into the data that Google uses to personalize ads.
83. We also launched new AdMob tools for developers that help give more control over ad content, easily access metrics and quickly identify and remove bad ads.

Accessibility

84. Project Euphonia is using AI to improve computer's' abilities to understand and transcribe a diverse set of speech patterns, including impaired speech.
85. Live Relay uses on-device speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion to allow the phone to listen and speak on people’s behalf while they type.
86. Project Diva is a research effort that makes Google Assistant more accessible for people with disabilities.

More developer announcements

87. We’re launching a preview for Local Home SDK that lets smart home developers bring a new level of speed and reliability to smart home devices.
88. The next version of our Maps Android SDK is now available for public beta. It’s built on a common platform with the Google Maps mobile app, which means better performance and feature support.
89. A new Google Maps Platform integration with deck.gl will make high-quality data visualizations at scale possible.
90. We’re unifying our efforts around third-party connected home devices under a single platform for developers. Now we’ll be delivering a single consumer and developer experience through the Works with Google Assistant program.
91. We introduced updates in ARCore to Augmented Images and Light Estimation— features that let you build more interactive, and realistic experiences.
92. Scene Viewer is a new tool that lets users view 3D objects in AR right from your website.
93. Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first.

94. We released 11 new Jetpack libraries and open-sourced an early preview of Jetpack Compose, a new unbundled toolkit designed to simplify UI development.
95. Android Studio 3.5 Beta is available for download and includes improvements in three core areas: system health, feature polish and bugs.
96. Flutter 1.5 includes hundreds of changes in response to developer feedback, including updates for new App Store iOS SDK requirements, updates to the iOS and Material widgets, engine support for new device types, and Dart 2.3 featuring new UI-as-code language features.
97. We released the first technical preview of Flutter for the web.
98. Our in-app updates API is out of beta. Now people can install updates without ever leaving the app.
99. New metrics and insights in the Google Play Console help developers better measure app health and analyze performance.
100.A new change is coming to Chrome Canary to help image-heavy websites can load more quickly.

At I/O ’19: Building a more helpful Google for everyone

Today, we welcomed thousands of people to I/O, our annual developer’s conference. It’s one of my favorite events of the year because it gives us a chance to show how we’re bringing Google’s mission to life through new technological breakthroughs and products.

Our mission to make information universally accessible and useful hasn’t changed over the past 21 years, but our approach has evolved over time. Google is no longer a company that just helps you find answers. Today, Google products also help you get stuff done, whether it’s finding the right words with Smart Compose in Gmail, or the fastest way home with Maps.

Simply put, our vision is to build a more helpful Google for everyone, no matter who you are, where you live, or what you’re hoping to accomplish. When we say helpful, we mean giving you the tools to increase your knowledge, success, health, and happiness. I’m excited to share some of the products and features we announced today that are bringing us closer to that goal.

Helping you get better answers to your questions

People turn to Google to ask billions of questions every day. But there’s still more we can do to help you find the information you need. Today, we announced that we’ll bring the popular Full Coverage feature from Google News to Search. Using machine learning, we’ll identify different points of a story—from a timeline of events to the key people involved—and surface a breadth of content including articles, tweets and even podcasts.

Sometimes the best way to understand new information is to see it. New features in Google Search and Google Lens use the camera, computer vision and augmented reality (AR) to provide visual answers to visual questions. And now we’re bringing AR directly into Search. If you’re searching for new shoes online, you can see shoes up close from different angles and even see how they go with your current wardrobe. You can also use Google Lens to get more information about what you’re seeing in the real world. So if you’re at a restaurant and point your camera at the menu, Google Lens will highlight which dishes are popular and show you pictures and reviews from people who have been there before. In GoogleGo, a search app for first-time smartphone users, Google Lens will read out loud the words you see, helping the millions of adults around the world who struggle to read everyday things like street signs or ATM instructions.

Google Lens: Urmila’s Story

Google Lens: Urmila’s Story

Helping to make your day easier

Last year at I/O we introduced our Duplex technology, which can make a restaurant reservation through the Google Assistant by placing a phone call on your behalf. Now, we’re expanding Duplex beyond voice to help you get things done on the web. To start, we’re focusing on two specific tasks: booking rental cars and movie tickets. Using “Duplex on the Web,” the Assistant will automatically enter information, navigate a booking flow, and complete a purchase on your behalf. And with massive advances in deep learning, it’s now possible to bring much more accurate speech and natural language understanding to mobile devices—enabling the Google Assistant to work faster for you.

We continue to believe that the biggest breakthroughs happen at the intersection of AI, software and hardware, and today we announced two Made by Google products: the new Pixel 3a (and 3a XL), and the Google Nest Hub Max. With Pixel 3a, we’re giving people the same features they love on more affordable hardware. Google Nest Hub Max brings the helpfulness of the Assistant to any room in your house, and much more.

Building for everyone

Building a more helpful Google is important, but it’s equally important to us that we are doing this for everyone. From our earliest days, Search has worked the same, whether you’re a professor at Stanford or a student in rural Indonesia. We extend this approach to developing technology responsibly, securely, and in a way that benefits all.

This is especially important in the development of AI. Through a new research approach called TCAV—or testing with concept activation vectors—we’re working to address bias in machine learning and make models more interpretable. For example, TCAV could reveal if a model trained to detect images of “doctors” mistakenly assumed that being male was an important characteristic of being a doctor because there were more images of male doctors in the training data. We’ve open-sourced TCAV so everyone can make their AI systems fairer and more interpretable, and we’ll be releasing more tools and open datasets soon.

Another way we’re building responsibly for everyone is by ensuring that our products are safe and private. We’re making a set of privacy improvements so that people have clear choices around their data. Google Account, which provides a single view of your privacy control settings, will now be easily accessible in more products with one tap. Incognito mode is coming to Maps, which means you can search and navigate without linking this activity with your Google account, and new auto-delete controls let you choose how long to save your data. We’re also making several security improvements on Android Q, and we’re building the protection of a security key right into the phone for two-step verification.

As we look ahead, we’re challenging the notion that products need more data to be more helpful. A new technique called federated learning allows us to train AI models and make products smarter without raw data ever leaving your device. With federated learning, Gboard can learn new words like “zoodles” or “Targaryen” after thousands of people start using them, without us knowing what you’re typing. In the future, AI advancements will provide even more ways to make products more helpful with less data.

Building for everyone also means ensuring that everyone can access and enjoy our products, including people with disabilities. Today we introduced several products with new tools and accessibility features, including Live Caption, which can caption a conversation in a video, a podcast or one that’s happening in your home. In the future, Live Relay and Euphonia will help people who have trouble communicating verbally, whether because of a speech disorder or hearing loss.

Project Euphonia: Helping everyone be better understood

Project Euphonia: Helping everyone be better understood

Developing products for people with disabilities often leads to advances that improve products for all of our users. This is exactly what we mean when we say we want to build a more helpful Google for everyone. We also want to empower other organizations who are using technology to improve people’s lives. Today, we recognized the winners of the Google AI Impact Challenge, 20 organizations using AI to solve the world’s biggest problems—from creating better air quality monitoring systems to speeding up emergency responses.

Our vision to build a more helpful Google for everyone can’t be realized without our amazing global developer community. Together, we’re working to give everyone the tools to increase their knowledge, success, health and happiness. There’s a lot happening, so make sure to keep up with all the I/O-related news.

Source: Android