Author: Clinton

One of the better kept secrets of services from Google is Google Flights.  The web app allows you to search for flights and find the lowest price for your travel.  Now Google has taken it a bit further by adding Machine Learning to the service.

Using Machine Learning, Google Flights will now give you trend information on flights you are searching in a new section, Flight Insights.  As the company stated in the release:

Using machine learning and statistical analysis of historical flights data, Flights displays tips under your search results, and you can scroll through them to figure out when it’s best to book flights

The new feature is great because you can see a graph that allows you to see what flight costs over a four day window.  This way, if your travel is flexible by a day or two, you could end up saving yourself hundreds of dollars on your airfare.  You will also see a notification on the Flights site if fares for the trip you are looking into are lower than normal – thus it might be the time to buy that flight.

It has taken a few weeks but the ability to elevate a call within Google Phone to Google Duo has now rolled out to everyone.  The feature allows you to switch a phone call from a voice only call to a video call with a touch of a button within the Phone app.  But, as you would suspect, there is a catch.

First, you and the person you are calling has to be using the latest Google Phone app and the latest Google Duo app.  The latter of these isn’t so tough as you can download it from the Play Store.  The former, however, isn’t so easy.  Many manufactures have their own phone apps and you can’t install the Google app.

Assuming you can get past the apps issue, the other gotcha is that both you and the calling party have to have Duo installed and registered with the mobile number you are calling.  It is only under these circumstances that you’ll see the video call option in the Phone app.

After making its debut on iOS last month, the new Grammarly Keyboard has now made its way to Android.  The new keyboard looks at the grammar used in your emails, texts and other apps to assure that you have proper spelling and grammar.

If you haven’t used Grammarly before, it is an excellent service that has been available as a Chrome extension for years.  More-or-less, this new keyboard app functions like the extension.  This new keyboard option is able to analyze your typing in any app on your phone to provide you suggestions on grammar and spelling.

Google Translate, the app that allows you to translate between 103 different languages, has a small but important update rolling out in the Play Store today.  The update is version 5.15.0.RC08 for those keeping score at home and should be hitting everyone’s devices via an OTA update this week.

The new version brings offline translation support to seven new languages from English.  These translations also include the instant camera translations.  If you aren’t familiar with the instant camera feature of the app, this is where you can point your phone’s camera at a sign in a foreign language and it will be translated into your native tongue. The new offline translation languages supported are:

• Bengali
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Marathi
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Urdu

In order for the offline translations to work, you will need to make sure you download these languages as well as others to your phone.  Most of the translation packs are less than 50MB in size.

Google has announced that they will be making some minor menu updates to some of the G Suite apps starting in January.  The updates are primarily focused on Google Docs and Google Slides with the idea being to make it easier for users to find certain menu settings.

The changes that Google outlined will be coming to the apps starting January 4, 2018 with the schedule release of the updates.  It should be noted that the changes that are coming are only for the online version of the apps.  Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides for Android and iOS are not impacted by this change.

As for the changes themselves, most of them are renaming of features and not necessarily moving them.  For example, in both Google Docs and Google Slides, “Lists” in the Format menu have been renamed to “Bullets and numbering”.

Google Backup and Sync, the desktop app that synchronizes files with your Google Drive, has an update rolling out that brings a lot of feature improvements and fixes.  The new build is version 3.38.7642.3857 for both Windows and MacOS.  Given that updates to the app are done in the background, it is possible that you have already received this new update.

Google has laid out all of the changes in this update in the release notes but here are the highlights:

• You can now switch between syncing all files and folders versus photos and videos only. In Backup and Sync Preferences, click Change in the “My Computer” section to choose which files sync.
• You can now ignore files by extension. In the “My Computer” section of Backup and Sync Preferences, click ChangeAdvanced settings, and then enter the file extensions to ignore. Note that this applies only to directories on your computer, not to the “My Drive” folder.
• You can now right-click any folder and select Sync this folder to start syncing that folder to Google Drive.
• Users are now notified when Backup and Sync can’t convert photos to high quality.
• Fixed an issue where multiple copies of the executable were being created in Windows.
• Fixed an issue where quitting Backup and Sync was taking a long time.
• More bug fixes and performance improvements.

As you can see, it is an extensive list that addresses several issues with the app for both Windows and Mac users.