Recorder is one of Google’s best applications of on-device machine learning (ML), exclusive to Pixel phones. The transcription app surprisingly originated inside the Google Creative Lab as the company sets out to build more “Pixel Smarts.”
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In honor of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” music video reaching 1 billion views on YouTube, as well as the song’s cultural impact, YouTube and Google Creative Lab have crafted “Infinite Bad Guy” as “the world’s first infinite music video.”
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AnyPixel.js is great example of a Google experiment becoming an actual product. The open source software and hardware library — available on GitHub — allows anyone to use the web to build “big, unusual, interactive displays” with any component.
Google’s previous attempt to bring books into the modern age involved digitizing and making them searchable. A new experiment between their Creative Lab and Visual Editions, a London-based publisher, have resulted in Editions at Play. In essence, they are interactive ebooks that are worthy of not immediately being written off as a gimmick.
Google Creative Lab, the same group responsible for a few quirky photo and location-based apps that we told you about earlier this year, has released a new live wallpaper for your Android phone that shows you some useful info about your device. There are three different status indicators shown with this wallpaper: Battery, WiFi, and Notifications…
Based on my initial testing, it seems that the wallpaper randomly switches between these three indicators. Locking and unlocking your phone, as well as opening and closing apps, will rotate between them so that you’re always up to date. Also, they all respond to the tilting of your device for some added phone — the battery one reminds me a lot of calibrating the iPhone’s compass app.
You can grab the app for free on the Google Play Store right now.
Like other megalithic technology giants including Facebook and even Xerox once upon a time, Google (Alphabet?) has many a skunkworks lab deep inside the halls of the company tasked with thinking creatively about execution and exploring non-traditional concepts, and which doesn’t have to worry about revenue or reaching the masses. One of those labs released three new apps for Android today, all of which center around using the device camera and sensors in (unsurprisingly) unique ways.
