Earlier this week, Google pushed a feature that could check your heart rate on the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro without the use of a smartwatch. By reading the minute details in your index fingertip using the Pixel’s camera, Google Fit can identify your BPM. This allows anyone with a Pixel 6 or 6 Pro to check their heart rate on the go in seconds without external hardware.
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Android not only offers a lot of new AI-driven processing capabilities, but it also adds a little flare to the quality of life department. With the addition of Material You, wallpapers mesh well with the UI adding a cohesiveness that many people love about their Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. In addition, Google’s widgets play along well and are easy to customize, allowing you to tailor the Android 12 experience even better.
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With iOS 14, Apple is requiring app developers to tell users about and have them opt-in to tracking. Google announced today that its first-party iOS apps will stop using certain tracking methods to avoid having to show the upcoming permission prompt. Meanwhile, the company also provided guidance to developers and advertisers ahead of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency initiative.
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For years now, the Android community has cried out for dark themes in applications and the system throughout, all while Google continued to slap more and more white themes basically everywhere. Slowly but surely, though, we’ve been seeing more Google dark mode apps in tons of apps and services. Here’s every Google dark mode app available today including Android, YouTube, Calendar, Chrome, and many more.
Last year, Google brought some of their signature homepage “Doodles” to the home screen search bar of Pixel phones. Now, it looks like Google may be bringing those same Doodles to non-Pixel Android phones in the near future, starting with a “Lab” experiment.
Speech-to-text technology has come a long way since the days of slowly droning into a microphone, hoping that the dictation software gets it at least half right. These days, applications like Siri or the Google Assistant can understand natural speech in real time, with high levels of accuracy. Using your voice to write or control your tech is pretty convenient, but that same technology can be pretty useful for people with hearing problems or anyone who needs live transcriptions of spoken language. That’s where Google’s Live Transcribe comes into the picture.
A PDF file is one of the most widely used document types. It can be shared across multiple platforms, compressed into a smaller size easily, and cannot be edited without leaving a digital footprint. These are some of the reasons that you’ll see PDFs used for legal documents like contracts and such. You can create your own PDFs straight from documents in Google Docs a few different ways.
The ability to receive a notification for a reminder can be a lifesaver. And one thing that makes those alerts even better is when they’re based on your location. If you need to ask your boss about that raise when you get to the office or print those concert tickets when you get to the library, location-based reminders come to the rescue. Google Keep offers handy location reminders, and here’s how to set them up.
Last year, a change to Chrome OS revealed that Messages for Web would be transitioning from Android.com to Google.com. This lined up with the recent transition from the “Android Messages” name to simply “Messages.” Today, a slightly updated version of Messages for Web with RCS settings has gone live on Google.com.
If This Then That, better known as IFTTT, will soon drop support for Gmail integration after Google announced that certain third-party apps will no longer be able to connect to your email account for automation purposes.
Google Duo has now officially added a series of bright and colorful video filters that add colorful powder, borders, sunglasses, and food to short messages to help Indian users celebrate the Holi festival.
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The Google Play Store has had its fair share of security issues. In this latest instance, the SimBad rogue adware was found by the Check Point research team to have infected over 200 now-gone apps on the Google Play Store (via Android Police).
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Google Pay is such a convenient contactless payment method and now it has expanded to a further 11 US banks.
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Google has released a brand new app called Bolo (which translates literally to ‘speak’ in Hindi) which has been designed to help children learn both Hindi and English.
While it still seems as if tech brands caring about our ‘digital health’ is a little contradictory, it’s still neat to be able to get data on just how long we’re using our handsets.
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Back in October, Google Photos introduced the new Live Albums feature that would identify people and pets and automatically create photo and video albums with a 10,000 photo and video limit. That has now been doubled to 20,000 thanks to a Live Albums update.
A change to Google Photos now means that any unsupported photo or video file types will now take up space on your Google account from December 6, 2018.
Initially an exclusive to YouTube Premium subscribers for the past six months, “Autoplay on Home” is now rolling out to all free mobile users. This feature helps viewers decide what to watch before clicking on a video within the Home tab.
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From January 7, 2019, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will cease to work for all users. Instead of SMS notifications, standard Google Calendar in-app notifications will be the main method of reminder for users regardless of device or wireless connection.
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Google Pay in the Scandinavian states of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden is now officially available, opening up the service to millions within the Nordic nations who previously only had access to Apple Pay for mobile payments, having launched within the region earlier this summer.
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For several years now PayPal has been a billing option in the Play Store, while Android Pay integration arrived last year. Today, the two companies are announcing a deeper integration that makes PayPal available throughout multiple Google apps and services as a new standard payment method.
At Cloud Next ’17, Google quietly announced a revamp to Gmail that focuses on intelligent features like smart reply and groupings. Now, over a year later, an Early Access Program for a “new Gmail experience” is launching in “the coming weeks.”
Search in Google Drive is getting a significant update today that adds autocorrect and Natural Language Processing search. NLP allows users to look for files in a more natural and informal manner, just like with “Ok Google” on mobile. Additionally, Docs is getting a new Columns feature and the ability to download converted documents in their original file format…
Team collaboration tools are now a dime a dozen and increasingly relying on third-party integrations to stand out. As part of that battle, HipChat today has announced deep integration with Google Apps that adds Calendar and Drive right into the main interface of the chat app.
