Late last week, we announced the schedule for April 18’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley, including some heavy hitters like Marc Raibert, Melonee Wise and Ken Goldberg. At the time, we noted we still had some big names left to reveal — and we weren’t joking. Today we’re excited to announce […]
Google today announced an update to its Cloud Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech APIs that introduces a few new features that should be especially interesting to enterprise users, as well as improved language support and a price cut. Most of these updates focus on the Speech-to-Text product, but Cloud Text-to-Speech is getting a major update with 31 […]
In an effort to combat the opioid crisis, Google will begin labeling places where people can safely dispose of their prescription drugs. Now, users can find clearly labeled drug disposal sites directly from searches for things like “drug drop off near me” or “medication disposal.” Those locations include a network of hospitals, pharmacies and government […]
Google’s Gradient Ventures, the search giant’s dedicated AI fund, is casting its eye to Asia after it led a $7 million Series A round for Elsa, a startup that operates an app for English language learners. The deal is Gradient’s first in Asia, and it includes participation from existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and SOSV. […]
Believe it or not, the retention of black and Latinx employees at Google was better last year than in 2017. Though, Google’s attrition rates of black and Latinx — which indicate the rate at which employees leave on an annual basis — are still higher than the national average. For Native American employees, Google’s attrition […]
Google today launched version 1.2 of its Flutter cross-platform UI framework at MWC Barcelona. With this, Flutter now features support for Android App Bundles, Google’s latest technology for packaging Android apps more efficiently and for creating instant apps, too. In addition, the framework lays the groundwork for helping developers accept in-app payments and adds a […]
Google today announced that its new machine learning-powered grammar checker is now live in Google Docs for G Suite users. The company first introduced this new feature at Cloud Next 2018, but it lingered in early access ever since. Grammar checkers are nothing new, of course, and even Docs itself has long had one. What’s […]
The FIDO Alliance and Google today announced that Android (from version 7.0 up) with the latest version of the Google Play Services is now FIDO2 certified. At first glance, that sounds rather boring, but it will enable developers to write apps that use a phone’s fingerprint scanner or a FIDO security key to authenticate users […]
At MWC Barcelona, Google today made a few announcements around its Assistant. A lot of these center around support for KaiOS, the operating system for low-end feature phones that Google invested in last year, and additional language support. While KaiOS, which was born out of Mozilla’s failed FirefoxOS project, may be for the very low […]
Google’s latest effort to help users monitor and control their screen time, Digital Wellbeing, is making its way to more devices. Initially available exclusively to Pixel and Android One device owners, Digital Wellbeing’s feature set is now rolling out to Nokia 6 and Nokia 8 devices with Android Pie, as well as on the new […]