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Tag: Google Assistant

  • Google Updates Workspace and Google Assistant for Remote Work

    Google Updates Workspace and Google Assistant for Remote Work

    Google has made significant updates to Workspace and Google Assistant to better facilitate remote and hybrid work models.

    Google is the latest company to bet on the permanent digital transformation the pandemic has brought on. Citing Gartner’sresearch that 90% of companies plan to allow at least some remote work post-pandemic, Google clearly wants Workspace (formerly G Suite) to play a significant role in that new reality.

    Google Workspace is at the nexus of Google’s own transformation. After all, Google Workspace was built in the cloud to power flexible, real-time, anywhere creation and equitable collaboration.

    To aid in the digital transformation, Google will be launching Google Workspace Frontline to help frontline workers have access to the same kind of collaborative tools that knowledge workers enjoy. The new solution will include Gmail, Chat, Docs, Drive and more in a custom solution designed to meet the needs of frontline workers.

    In addition, Workspace with Google Assistant is now generally available to all users. The service brings the power of Google Assistant to Workspace, allowing users to join meetings, check their schedule, send messages and more, all by using their voice. The feature is currently available on mobile devices, and is in beta for smart speakers and Smart Displays.

    If there’s a mantra that captures the last year of work, it might be “flexibility in the face of change.” It’s how our customers and our own employees have bridged the physical distances to continue making an impact in a rapidly changing world. As work continues to evolve for all of us, Google Workspace is committed to providing a solution that’s flexible, helpful, and that fuels innovation. We’re also committed to enabling collaboration equity wherever and however we can. At its core, this has been our mission for more than a decade and we’re excited to partner with our customers and users to continue bringing it to life.

  • Voice Activation on Google Wear OS Broken For Months

    Voice Activation on Google Wear OS Broken For Months

    Google Wear OS users have grown increasingly frustrated with Google after months of voice activation not working on their smartwatches.

    Wear OS makes use of Google Assistant, with the ability being one of the main selling points. Reports starting showing up on the Google Issue Tracker back in November, with scores of people complaining of being impacted by the problem.

    The issue spilled out onto Reddit Wednesday, with the thread already amassing hundreds of posts.

    Users are still able to use Google Assistant, but doing so requires using the touchscreen or a long-press on the power button. Needless to say, this makes interaction much more difficult in situations where a person is active and unable to physically interact with their watch.

    After months of ignoring the issue, the uptick in attention has finally gotten Google’s. In a statement to The Verge, the company says it is “aware of the issues some users have been encountering” and will work to “address these and improve the overall experience.”

    Unfortunately, no timeline has been provided.

  • Ford Partners With Google For Cloud, Data, AI and Machine Learning

    Ford Partners With Google For Cloud, Data, AI and Machine Learning

    Ford has named Google its preferred partner in its connected vehicle efforts, also naming Google Cloud as its preferred cloud platform.

    Like virtually every other traditional automaker, Ford is under increased pressure to focus on the next generation of data-driven, connected vehicles — an area where Tesla is seen as having a commanding lead. As a result, many automakers are turning to the world’s leading cloud platforms to help them make the transformation.

    Ford and Google are forming a new collaborate group, Team Upshift, “that will push the boundaries of Ford’s transformation, unlock personalized consumer experiences, and drive disruptive, data-driven opportunities.”

    As part of the partnership, Ford will rely on Google Cloud, and Google’s expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and data. Millions of Ford and Lincoln vehicles across all price points will provide an Android-powered digital experience, along with Google apps and services. Google Assistant, Google Maps and Google Play will all be available, with Android making it possible for developers to build additional apps.

    “As Ford continues the most profound transformation in our history with electrification, connectivity and self-driving, Google and Ford coming together establishes an innovation powerhouse truly able to deliver a superior experience for our customers and modernize our business,” said Jim Farley, President and CEO of Ford.

    “From the first moving assembly line to the latest driver-assist technology, Ford has set the pace of innovation for the automotive industry for nearly 120 years,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “We’re proud to partner to apply the best of Google’s AI, data analytics, compute and cloud platforms to help transform Ford’s business and build automotive technologies that keep people safe and connected on the road.”

  • Google Unveils New TV Service, Google TV

    Google Unveils New TV Service, Google TV

    Google made a surprise announcement today, unveiling its take on television: Google TV.

    In the blog post announcing the release, Google acknowledged the myriad of options people have to watch TV. From movies, to live TV to streaming and DVR content, the supply of content is virtually limitless. Unfortunately, the plethora of services can make it difficult to find content. In addition, it can be an annoyance switching back and forth between a bunch of different services.

    Google is looking to address these issues, with a service that pulls content from a variety of sources and serves as the central hub from which to watch it. The new service will be heavily integrated with Google Assistant, providing the ability to interact via voice.

    “The new Google TV experience brings together movies, shows, live TV and more from across your apps and subscriptions and organizes them just for you,” writes Shalini Govilpai, Senior Director, Google TV. “To build this, we studied the different ways people discover media—from searching for a specific title to browsing by genre—and created an experience that helps you find what to watch. We also made improvements to Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is part of how we better understand and organize your media into topics and genres, from movies about space travel to reality shows about cooking. You’ll also see titles that are trending on Google Search, so you can always find something timely and relevant.”

    The new Chromecast with Google TV is available for $49.99 and comes with a remote and 4K support. The Google TV app will begin rolling out to Android devices in the US today, and will start showing up on Sony televisions and other Android TV OS-powered devices starting next year.

  • Baidu Takes AI Crown, Achieves New Level of Language Understanding

    Baidu Takes AI Crown, Achieves New Level of Language Understanding

    The ability to talk with an artificial intelligence (AI), be it a computer or robot, has been a staple of science fiction for decades. Despite modern advances, anyone who has used Siri, Alexa, Cortana or the Google Assistant knows we’re still a ways off from what’s portrayed in science fiction.

    Chinese tech giant Baidu has just taken a big step in that direction, however. According to the MIT Technology Review, Baidu has leapfrogged Microsoft and Google in helping AI better understand language.

    General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) is the industry benchmark used to gauge an AI’s language comprehension skills. For perspective, most humans manage a score of 87 out of 100. Baidu’s model, however, scored a 90—a first for AI models.

    The team attributed their breakthrough with ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) to the steps they needed to take in order to help it understand Chinese. The most advanced AI language models use a technique called “masking,” where the AI randomly hides words in order to predict the meaning of the sentence. Because of the differences between Chinese and English, Baidu “researchers trained ERNIE on a new version of masking that hides strings of characters rather than single ones. They also trained it to distinguish between meaningful and random strings so it could mask the right character combinations accordingly.”

    Not only did this method allow ERNIE to better understand Chinese language, but those lessons also improved its English processing, enabling it to achieve the highest GLUE score yet. Hopefully, this breakthrough will help pave the way for the type of AI interactions that have, so far, existed only in the realm of science fiction.

  • Google’s Siri Competitor Will Reportedly Be Called “Assistant”

    We’ve known that Google has been working on a competitor to Apple’s Siri for quite some time. A few months ago, it became known that it’s been in development under the name Majel, an homage to Star Trek.

    TechCrunch is now reporting, without naming sources, that it will simply be called Assistant, and will go beyond what Siri does so far. “I have no idea whether that name was scrapped but do know that ‘Assistant’ is not a part of GoogleX as Majel was,” reports Alexia Tsotsis.

    Google X would be that “secret robot lab” of Google’s

    She says her source has indicated that it’s being developed by the Android team, but that Google’s Amit Singhal (of the search division) is involved, that’s it’s about gathering data, adding a personalization layer, and that it’s about accomplishing goals, rather than just returning search results.

    Google does already have voice search for that.

    In 2010, Google acquired Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company that generates natural computer speech from samples of recorded voice.

    “In Star Trek, they don’t spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards—they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back,” said Google Speech Technology Manager Mike Cohen at the time. “It’s a more naturalway to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems. We’ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started automatically transcribing speech to produce captions on YouTube videos.”

    But Phonetic Arts comes in when you start talking about computers talking back to you – voice output as opposed to input – kind of like Siri, though Google has offered some things in this area since long before Siri came to the iPhone. Examples include features in Google Translate and Maps Navigation.

    Soon, there will be a lot of new examples, from the sound of it.

    One big difference between Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri, according to Tsotsis’ report, is that developers will be able to utilize Assistant for their own concepts.

    Of course, Google’s lack of a Siri competitor hasn’t stopped developers from trying to create their own counterparts for Android users. One recently revealed example of this would be Utter:

    It’s cool, but projects like this may be largely a waste of time as Google prepares its own solution.