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Google to Roll Out its Faster and Smarter Next-generation Assistant to New Pixel Smartphones

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Google’s I/O 2019 conference started yesterday and tomorrow will be its final day. The company revealed many new products on its first day, including adding one of the most interesting features to its Google Assistant, i.e., Continued Conversations.

Google-Assistant
Image Source: wccftech.com

The ones who have already used voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, etc. would admit that despite being the smart assistants, these are not as convenient as these are expected to be. In fact, these seem more like the text-to-speech features. These have been the best for carrying out the smaller tasks but never provided that natural communication experience to the users.

But now, the latest Continued Conversations feature of Google Assistant has been brought to provide the users that smart yet natural conversation experience. The company provided a demo of the new feature as to how it will help to simplify most of the tasks for its users. For example, the feature will help the users to craft messages and send to friends, search for a particular file to send it through email. The users can now ask the assistant to take a selfie, hail a ride as well as check the weather, simultaneously.

The company has revamped its old AI models for the assistant, by making it smaller, such that now the requests will be processed directly on the device, which earlier were sent to a remote server. This way, the new Google Assistant will respond to the requests 10 times faster than it used to do previously.

Most importantly, the company has eliminated the need to exclaim ‘Hey Google’ for every single request. Now the user will have to speak the two words only once to wake the assistant, and after the Google Assistant is active, they can give it the commands, directly.

Google is calling the new voice assistant as ‘next-generation’ Assistant, and this new assistant will be rolled out to the new Pixel phones at first, later this year. The assistant is smarter and can process the requests in real time, without annoying its users. The company has not commented on if the assistant will be available only for the high-end devices or for other low-budget devices too.

Third-party Developers can Now Develop Apps for Google’s Android Automotive OS

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Google is all prepping up for its upcoming I/O 2019, it is going to host on 7 May in California, U.S., and it has already started on giving hints on few of its new launches it is going to announce at the event. According to one of its early pushed out news, it is going to open its Automotive OS for the third-party developers, so that they would be able to develop functionalities and entertainment apps for the vehicle infotainment systems.

Google Android Automotive
Image Source: venturebeat.com

Google introduced the Android Automotive OS, an OS specially designed to work with vehicle infotainment systems, in 2017. Do not confuse Android Automotive with Google’s other product having a similar name, i.e. Android Auto, which is a mobile app. Whereas, Android Automotive is a full-fledged operating system developed for vehicles. Both the platforms are using the same underlying framework, and having the same framework, Android Automotive also supports compatibility with different screen sizes, OEM customizations, and regional driver safety guidelines.

Android Automotive OS is based on Google’s Linux supported, open-source mobile operating system. But it runs on the vehicles, instead of smartphones and tablets.

The company has hinted that it is already working with Volvo’s all-electric Polestar 2, powering its infotainment system with the Android Automotive. The Polestar 2’s infotainment system will have all the major services from Google including Google Assistant, Google Maps and the Google Play Store.

Google is also working with companies like Spotify and others, through which it will be able to bring entertainment apps to the Android Automotive OS. With the help of third-party developers, the Android Automotive will also be able to add support for the features like navigation, communication, and beyond to the OS.

Google will be discussing on how to develop the apps for its Android Automotive OS for cars, in the event, and if the developers won’t be attending the event, they can find more information on the same through the Google Groups community. The developers can also ask questions regarding the development using the tag android-automotive tag on StackOverflow.

Google Introduces New Signed Exchanges to Show the Original URL for the AMPs

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Google introduced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in 2015, in order to speed up the load time for the mobile web pages. Since then, these have been used by almost every website. Those web pages are simpler and load super quickly. Google pre-loads the web page and produces its cached copy to provide lesser load time for the user.

But with the good side of the AMPs, there has been a flaw that has been annoying the publishers of the content on those web pages, over the past years. The URL which shows up for the web page is usually in the format “http://www.google.com/abc” instead of the real URL of that particular web page.

google amp
Image Source: edenstudios.com

This way, it has prevented the publishers from displaying their content under their unique URLs. But now, Google has launched a fix for this problem, such that the URL that will display on cached AMP results will be the same as the publisher’s link. This new fix is called the Signed Exchanges.

Google is now using the new Web Packaging standard in order to make the browser trust the document belonging to the original publisher with the help of digital signatures and the signed exchanges.

Originally, the browser is programmed to reject the scripts that do not belong to the original publisher and try to access the data in the web page. But from now, the publishers will have to use the signed exchange in order to make a portable copy of their content and to achieve faster content delivery, easy content sharing between different users and better offline experience. With the signed exchange, the publishers will have to publish two different versions of their content, i.e. signed and unsigned.

AMPs have been great at providing the users with the content instantly, and also, bringing the desired traffic to their eCommerce websites. So it had become essential for Google to provide a better fix for the problem, and for that, the company had been working since the past one year. In fact, Google had announced last January that it is working on fixing the URL of the AMPs such that the real URL of the AMP will be displayed instead of the Google URL. The company had also provided a developers preview for the solution last year in November.

The new fix is expected to be a great move for driving the traffic from the AMP version of the web pages to its original domain as well as reduce the bounce rate for it.

Google Celebrates Gmail’s 15th Birthday; Adds New Features to it

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Gmail has turned 15 today, and Google has added a few new useful features to it, to celebrate the 15th birthday of its most successful product. Google launched Gmail on 1 April 2004 in order to experiment with the email process, and after 15 years, Gmail is the most used email service across the world. In fact, despite being a Google product, it is also really popular among iPhone and iPad users.

gmail birthday
Image Source: techcrunch.com

Although Yahoo and Hotmail were leading the email business over a decade ago, Gmail slowly got into the race and finally became the number one email service. Gmail has a global user-base of over a billion people and is free to use. However, it also has got a paid enterprises suite.

In recent years, Gmail saw remarkable changes. Paul Buchheit started developing Gmail as the ‘Caribou’ project, and after working for years on it, Google launched Gmail in 2004. It was faster and offered an initial storage capacity of one gigabyte, per user. Hence, within no time Gmail took off to the success ride. Currently, Gmail offers 15 GB of free storage to its users, and the storage can be extended further as a paid service.

Google was the first to start the reply to all, i.e. group conversation, chat, priority inbox and calendar. Being the first successful product, Gmail also encouraged Google to experiment with other fields, and Google launched products like Google map, Google Drive, and even Android OS.

With Gmail, Google moved ahead from the searches and even launched its own browser, i.e., Google Chrome.

As a part of birthday celebrations, Google has added new features to Gmail, including improved Smart Compose (with four added languages Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese) and email schedule features. The earlier version of Smart Compose for Android was only available on Pixel 3, but now every Android user will be able to access this feature.

In January this year, Google had launched a new interface for Gmail mobile app that allowed users to see the attachments without opening the email. According to Google, it is also testing new features including pinned messages, reminders and category bundles to be added to Gmail for Android. Noticeably, the company has just shut down Inbox and tomorrow Google+ will also stop functioning, as now Google wants to solely focus on the improvement of Gmail.

Gmail Finally Releases its AMP-based ‘Dynamic Emails’ for its G-Suite User

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After a year-long time, of the announcement, Google is finally has released the AMP support in Gmail for its G Suite audience. The company announced that it is going to release the beta of its fast-loading AMP tech to Gmail starting from today. The new feature is specially designed to provide users with more interactive messaging experience.

According to Google, these Dynamic Emails will give the user more web-based interactive encounter such that the user can fill out forms, browse image carousels, RSVP to an event, reply to Google Docs comments or even browse catalogues, without leaving their inbox and following any external link to a separate website.

The AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology will help Gmail to keep the content fresh and latest information will be displayed on the screen every single time, like new job recommendations, latest comment threads, product listings or social network recommendations within the email irrespective of the time the mail was received.

According to Google, its other products like Google Docs will also automatically gel with the new AMP feature and can be embedded in the messages directly. Hence, the user will not be receiving new emails every single time they are mentioned in a document, rather the thread will get refreshed every time and the user will be able to reply to the mentions from within the inbox.

For the dynamic emails, the company has partnered with other social networks including Doodle, Pinterest, Booking.com, etc. For now, Google has only rolled out the new AMP feature for its desktop G suite users, but according to the post-Google released on Tuesday regarding the same, the mobile version of the new dynamic emails will also roll out soon.

YouTube Launches its Music Streaming Services for its Indian Users

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It has been less three weeks since Spotify has entered the Indian music streaming market. And now, Google has also just entered the same market after it launched its new music streaming service, the YouTube Music, along with YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium.

Youtube-Music
Image Source: techaeris.com

The YouTube Music will be a free but ad-supported music service for the Indian users, whereas the YouTube Music Premium will be a paid service like YouTube Premium. YouTube Music Premium will cost Rs 99, and the YouTube Premium will cost Rs.129, a month per user, offering an ad-free experience to its users. Through the premium service, the users will have access to features like background play, and millions of tracks and videos, which also will be available for offline downloads. The YouTube Premium subscribers will also get access to YouTube Originals, and YouTube Music Premium.

YouTube is already hosting over 245 million monthly active users, and the number is constantly increasing every day. It has been an effective platform for different types of content creators, especially for the musicians.

“India is where the multi-lingual music scene thrives. It’s interesting to note how Indian artists have consistently claimed top spots over the last few months in the Global YouTube Top Artists chart. With YouTube Music, we are hoping to bring the best in global and Indian music to millions of fans across India, and give them an immersive music experience, with the magic of music on YouTube.” said Lyor Cohen, Global Head of Music, YouTube.

Google is already active in the music streaming service with Google Play Music. For now, the subscribers registered with the Google Play Music service will also be able to access their purchased music and uploads through their YouTube Music service.

The Indian music streaming market is already dominated by the streaming services like Amazon Music, Apple Music, JioSaavn, and Gaana, etc., and in this tough competition, to lure new customers, Google is offering a special introductory offer of 3 months free subscription for YouTube Music Premium to be redeemed by March 31, 2020. But the offer is valid only for the people who are not registered to the YouTube Premium or Google Play Music. Also for the Samsung Galaxy S10 users, Google is offering the same free subscription for a period of four months.