Even YouTube is adding Stories. The popular format introduced by Snapchat, then adopted by Instagram, Skype, Facebook, Messenger and even some dating apps, is now making its way to YouTube as a new feature the company is calling “Reels.” To be clear, Reels is YouTube’s spin on Stories, not an exact copy. And Reels won’t […]
Andy Rubin has taken a leave of absence from Essential. The phone maker’s founder and CEO will be taking time off from the company to “deal with personal matters,” a spokesman for the company confirmed with TechCrunch this morning. According to a statement, Rubin announced his intention at a board meeting earlier this month. “The […]
There are now two Dianes running the show at Google Cloud. The company announced that Diane Bryant has been hired as the COO of the division. She joins Diane Greene, who came on board as Senior VP of Google Cloud in November 2015. Greene appeared to be excited about the prospect of her joining the […]
Google’s smart speaker got a little smarter this week, with the addition of a multitasking feature. The new capability makes it possible for the device to accomplish two different missions at the same time. It was rolled out with little fanfare and first noted by CNET. We’ve since confirmed the addition with Google. It’s a […]
The city of Toronto has begun sharing its traffic data with navigation service provider Waze. Google-owned Waze will also provide access to its real-time traffic and road conditions data back to the city, in exchange, and both parties expect to improve navigation around the city thanks to the new collaborative effort. Waze offers turn-by-turn navigation […]
YouTube, that strange stew of the best and worst content on the web, is cracking down on abuse and error relating to kid-focused video. Jokers and questionably ethical creators who targeted kids or used them in their videos will have a harder time getting viewers and getting money. The tendency of kids to watch a […]
We knew this was only a matter of time, but Google today confirmed that Google Lens as part of the Google Assistant is now rolling out to all Pixel phone owners. That’s something Google already announced at its hardware event, but until now, the timing was unclear. If you don’t see it when you call […]
Google today announced that it’s cutting the price of using Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs through its Compute Engine by up to 36 percent. In U.S. regions, using the somewhat older K80 GPUs will now cost $0.45 per hour while using the newer and more powerful P100 machines will cost $1.46 per hour (all with per-second billing). […]
The Pixel Buds are an inevitability. The headphones were born out of necessity when Google embraced the smartphone zeitgeist and dropped the headphone jack with the Pixel 2. The company’s first Bluetooth headphones are a $159 attempt to ease that transition, and another chance to get Assistant out into the world currently dominated by Alexa. […]
Google today announced the beta launch of its enterprise edition of Dialogflow, its tool for building chatbots and other conversational applications. In addition, Dialogflow (both in its free and enterprise version) is now getting built-in support for speech recognition, something that developers previously had to source through the Google Cloud Speech API or similar services. […]