For all the talk of how voice assistants could be the future of IoT or computing in general, the only consistently engaging use of home assistants like Echo or Google Home seems to be audio playback. Today, Google is making it a bit easier for the cheapos to get in on the action, as it’s […]
Google announced a major update to its mobile search results pages today. Whenever your query brings up a video, Google will now show you a silent six-second clip to help you decide if it’s actually a video you want to see. This will work for the vast majority of videos on the web today — […]
Computer vision — the branch of artificial intelligence that lets computers “see” and process images like humans do (and, actually, often better than us), and then use those images to help run programs — is at the heart of how the next generation of tech is developing, and this week Google made an acquisition this […]
Google might soon release a data-friendly version of its search app for mobile. That’s because the company is currently piloting such an app in Indonesia, as the eagle-eyed team at Android Police first spotted. “Search Lite” — which TechCrunch understands is not the name of the app, but it is certainly an accurate description of […]
Google’s consumer-facing chat application Allo, a successor of sorts to Gchat, is today available on the web for desktop users. The service, which lets you chat with friends while taking advantage of features like stickers, “smart replies” for one-tap responses, and Google Assistant integration, among other things, has been in the works for some time. […]
After GoDaddy told the Daily Stormer to get lost, the neo-Nazi news site chose Google as a new home for its controversial domain. Now, Google too has given the site the boot. “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. At the time […]
Google’s Cloud Speech API, which has allowed developers to use Google’s services to transcribe spoken words into text since its launch in 2016, is getting a major update today. The most interesting of these is probably the addition of support for 30 new languages on top of the 89 languages the service already understood (though, […]
Two unconnected events that splashed controversy over the tech industry this week share the same underlying theme: Empathy. Or rather a lack of it. Here’s the first: An internal memo written by a Google staffer was leaked to the press. The 10-page note, authored by a white, male software engineer called James Damore, argued that Google’s left-leaning political […]
It’s been quite a week in tech, with now-former Google engineer James Damore’s controversial post about gender going viral and his subsequent firing. So, right on cue, workplace culture and company review platform Comparably has come out with a ranking of the top 10 tech companies for people of color, as well as the top […]
Google CEO Sundar Pichai was expected to hold an all-hands meeting this afternoon in light of now-former Google engineer James Damore’s post about differences between men and women. Shortly before it was scheduled to start, Pichai sent out a note to employees letting them know it’s cancelled, Recode reports. Some employees reportedly expressed fear that they’d […]