Way back at the beginning of the year (seemingly 24 or 25 months, at this point), Amazon brought voice control to its Alexa app for Android. The move marked a big step toward the company’s push onto third-party mobile devices. At the time, it added that it would bring similar functionality to the iPhone “soon” […]
A month and change after I/O, Google convenes a meeting of a few small groups of journalists at an upscale Thai restaurant in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It’s an unusual locale for one of the world’s largest companies. The tables are cleared out to make room for nine chairs, in three rows of three, facing […]
It’s not just Slack — there’s a Google Home and Chromecast outage, too. A Google spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that there’s an issue affecting “some” of its customers of these platforms, and it’s currently investigating the issue and working on a solution. The company declined to share other information about the nature of the outage […]
Google Calendar is the latest Google app to get an update focused on improving users’ “digital wellbeing.” The company announced today it’s rolling out a new “Out of Office” feature in Google Calendar, alongside a setting for customizable working hours. The working hours signal to others when you’re unavailable, and allows Google Calendar to automatically […]
More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of lawmakers garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work. This study from a Norway watchdog group eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their users towards making […]
Google’s complex lineup of ad products is getting rebranded. Sridhar Ramaswamy, the senior vice president who leads Google’s ad efforts, explained the rebrand at a press event this morning, where he said the company has been getting “consistent feedback” over the past few years that the plethora of ad products and brands — assembled largely […]
Google is giving developers a new storage option in its cloud. Cloud Filestore, which will launch into beta next month, essentially offers a fully managed network attached storage (NAS) service in the cloud. This means that companies can now easily run applications that need a traditional file system interface on the Google Cloud Platform. Traditionally, […]
Google has announced a refresh of the Google Accounts user interface. The changes are intended to make it easier for users to navigate settings and review data the company has associated with an account — including information relating to devices, payment methods, purchases, subscriptions, reservations, contacts and other personal info. The update also makes security and […]
From next month two Google StreetView cars will be driving around London’s streets fitted with sensors that take air quality readings every 30 meters to map and monitor air quality in the UK capital. There will also be 100 fixed sensors fitted to lampposts and buildings in pollution blackspots and sensitive locations in the city […]
Someday we’ll have an app that you can point at a weird bug or unfamiliar fern and have it spit out the genus and species. But right now computer vision systems just aren’t up to the task. To help things along, researchers have assembled hundreds of thousands of images taken by regular folks of critters […]