Over the past several weeks, gapless playback rolled out to some YouTube Music subscribers. The capability is now officially available for all Premium users on the Android app and web client.
Back in March, Google released a useful Analytics-powered dashboard for newsrooms. Great on large screens, Realtime Content Insights (RCI) is now integrating trending topics from Google Trends.
When getting a package tracking number, most people today just Google it, as the search engine has long been able to direct users to the correct shipping carrier’s site. Google Search package tracking could soon be directly integrated.
Google Play this year rolled out a big Android redesign and corresponding dark theme. In October, we spotted work on a Material Theme account switcher and it’s now beginning to roll out alongside a new splash screen.
The Google Assistant on Android is testing a new feature for users who prefer keyboard input over voice. This experiment adds autocomplete suggestions above the text field, similar to the Google app when searching the web.
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With the year coming to a close in a matter of weeks, it’s time for annual recaps. Google today published the Play Store’s Best of 2019 that takes a look at apps, games, movies, television shows, and books/audiobooks.
When Chrome launched a decade ago, one if its marquee features was a unified field for entering URLs and searching. The browser’s Material Theme revamp last year added rich inline results, and Google is now integrating Drive search and file suggestions.
Despite the explosive growth of rivals, Netflix is still one of the biggest players in the streaming world. Now, it appears Netflix is testing a new menu that contains several options including the long-awaited shuffle button for TV shows.
Google frequently updates and tweaks Search algorithms to improve the accuracy of results. The latest change is focused on improving Google’s local search results by leveraging an AI-based system known as neural matching.
In addition to rolling out a rename of the Assistant tab today, some Google Photos for Android users are encountering a bug that appears to remove the hold-and-drag gesture. This action is very useful for quickly selecting multiple images.
This month, Google Photos redesigned the “Info” menu and added album sorting. The picture backup and editing app is now renaming the “Assistant” tab to “For you” and moving some functionality into a new “Manage your library” feed.
Google Photos is by far the best way to back up your pictures and videos to the cloud, but it’s also becoming a great way to bring those memories to physical prints with expanded printing options. Starting today, Google Photos offers individual photo printing from Walmart and CVS alongside new canvas printing options.
YouTube Music for Android gained adaptive icons this May, but an update in recent weeks broke the implementation. Version 3.43 addresses that issues and adds a dark theme for settings.
Assistant Ambient Mode, which was announced at IFA 2019 in September, began rolling out to Nokia and Xiaomi devices two weeks ago. Google today officially detailed the assistive feature for phones in a video.
Play Pass rolled out last month as a subscription service that “unlocks” hundreds of Android apps and games for a monthly fee. Since launch, Google has added 37 more titles to the collection.
At the Tokyo edition of Cloud Next ’19 this July, Google announced that the Advanced Protection Program is coming to Cloud enterprise customers. G Suite and GCP users can soon take advantage of the company’s most stringent security measures against phishing.
When YouTube introduced a dark theme last year, it was ahead of most other Google services. However, as more apps were updated, the Android client stood out for not respecting the default appearance. YouTube for Android now follows the user-set device theme.
Google wants the future of email to be less static and more interactive. Its solution based on Accelerated Mobile Pages has found industry support, and “dynamic email” is now coming to Gmail for Android and iOS.
In addition to Docs gaining Smart Compose, Google is significantly improving the grammar correction it introduced earlier this year in the G Suite app. It’s also gaining spelling autocorrect from Gmail.
At I/O 2019, Sundar Pichai announced that Google Duplex was “moving beyond voice” and coming to the web. After publicly testing in late September, Duplex is officially launching today as “Google Assistant in Chrome” to help you buy movie tickets.
Last year, Google introduced Smart Compose to help you write entire emails while maintaining your voice. The feature is now expanding from Gmail to Google Docs as part of a beta program.