Generating speech from a piece of text is a common and important task undertaken by computers, but it’s pretty rare that the result could be mistaken for ordinary speech. A new technique from researchers at Alphabet’s DeepMind takes a completely different approach, producing speech and even music that sounds eerily like the real thing. Early […]
2016 might be the year that HTTP finally dies. Chrome’s security team announced today that the browser will start marking websites that use insecure HTTP connections to transmit passwords and credit card data as insecure, beginning in January 2017. The warning will appear in the address bar of the browser and will call users’ attention […]
Sure there’s some kind of fruit-related event going on right now, but this week is also BoxWorks, the annual conference for the enterprise content cloud platform provider. At that event, Box CEO Aaron Levie and Google’s SVP of Google’s cloud offerings Diane Greene are announcing a partnership that turns Box into a third-party storage option […]
If there is one threat to Google Search, it’s that the majority of content created today lives inside social apps like Instagram and Snapchat and can’t easily be indexed to show in search results. And, even when Google does manage to pull in a piece of content from a social network, it’s nearly impossible to extract […]
Google is speeding up its internet services in Asia once again. Fresh from expanding its data centers in the region — which are located in Singapore and Taiwan — last year, the company said today that it has switched on a new undersea cable that will quicken services like YouTube and its cloud computing platform. The cable connects […]
More of the content we’re looking for is saved in mobile applications, which is why Google has been working to bring that information to the surface by indexing apps in search. Now, it will do the same thing on your phone, too. The company is introducing a new search mode in its Google app called […]
Here’s a stat that’s sure to worry Google: smartphone applications now account for half the time that U.S. users spend online, up from 41 percent back in July 2014, according to a new report from comScore. And when you add tablet applications into the mix, that figure rises to nearly 60 percent. The new milestone was […]
Google’s AI technology may be capable of putting on a trippy art show — thanks to its neural network-powered DeepDream computer vision program — but when Google turned its machine learning technology to the world of fashion via its new experiment Project Muze, the results were less than compelling. Designed in partnership with European e-commerce company Zalando, Project Muze is an attempt […]
After three years of development, starting at Motorola then transferred to Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara is being “suspended” and ultimately, is cancelled. Even after selling Moto to Lenovo in 2014, Google has touted the modular smartphone project as not only an alternative to current smartphone design, but the future of smartphone customization. This change […]
Back in July, a group of Faroe Islanders launched their own version of Street View, cheekily called “Sheep View 360,” by outfitting sheep on the island with 360-degree camera and using that to fuel its own mapping project. The Faroe Island crew was acting alone, in an effort to shore up its absence of Google […]