Tag: Google

YouTube understands the power of video to tell stories, move people, and leave a lasting impression. One part of storytelling that many people take for granted is sound, yet sound adds color to the world around us. YouTube has had automated captions for its videos since 2009, and now it’s expanding the feature to include captions for sound effects. While those three were some of the most frequent manually captioned sounds, YouTube says it’s only in the early stages of making improvements for its deaf and hard of hearing users.…

Google has announced a slew of updates to its Duo, Allo, and Photos apps, including new calling capabilities, file transfers, and easier photo sharing. Google Duo will also offer audio-only calls on Android and iOS. The new feature is now available in Brazil and will be arriving “around the world in the coming days,” according to Google.  Google reported that they are now adding audio-only calling in Duo. So in those moments when video calling isn’t an option users can stay connected with family and friends through audio calling. Duo…

Google is rolling out a quality of life improvement to Gmail desktop users that makes previewing video attachments in Gmail much smoother and quicker. The email client has now introduced a nifty ability to stream video attachments instead of downloading them. This will let you understand what the video is about before deciding on a download, a rather useful feature to save up on the cramped storage space on PCs and laptops. Previously, in order to view a video attachment in Gmail, you would have to download it to your…

Google recently killed its Hangouts API and said that consumer apps that use it won’t work after April 25th. However, the tech giant has quietly unveiled Meet by Google Hangouts app for businesses, a big part of its strategy to shuffle the Hangouts app towards businesses and away from consumers. The search giant said last year that it wouldn’t abandon Hangouts, but it’s not clear if it’ll allow consumers to keep using it or push them over to Duo. The new app supports HD video meetings with up to 30…

Google’s latest artificial intelligence experiment is a music-playing piano bot that digests whatever keyboard melodies you give it and tries to respond in kind. The neat tool is called Artificial Intelligence Duet, and it’s part of an ongoing push from Google’s Creative Lab division to help the public familiarize themselves with AI and all the ways it can mimic human behavior — and even create art. According to the Verge, a collection of music-focused Artificial Intelligence tools were first shown off last fall, but now AI Duet in particular has…