Tag: Google

To help you keep track of your exercise goals, Google has announced a new integration between Google Calendar and Google Fit.  The change is behind the scenes and once it rolls out to everyone, you can track your exercising in Google Fit and it will automatically mark your time slot for exercising in Google Calendar as “done”.  It is a nice and easy way to keep track of your exercise routine while making sure it is built into your daily schedule.

Goal tracking in Google Calendar is not new.  It has been there since April of last year and allows you to track anything from exercise to reading time to learning a new language.  The goals are quite handy actually and the app is smart enough to look at what is on your calendar and schedule that goal in a time period where you don’t have other activities.  You can also tell it to set a time for the goal in the morning, afternoon or evening for even more refinement.  Now, on your exercise goals, you can tie them in with Google Fit so when you complete an exercise there, it update Calendar automatically as the goal being complete.

Google is expanding the reach of Google Assistant and it is coming to a television near you.  At CES 2017 yesterday, the company announced that the AI-driven personal assistant would be coming to Android TV and a wide range of other Smart TVs on the market.

In the coming months, the Google Assistant on Android TV will come to the NVIDIA SHIELD, along with all Android TVs in the US running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or Android 7.0 Nougat, such as the AirTV Player, Sharp Aquos, Sony Bravia, Xiaomi Mi Box, and more. And once available, the NVIDIA SHIELD will be the first TV device to offer a hands-free Assistant experience — so “Dim the lights” will only be an “Ok Google” away!

The news means that Google Assistant will start moving beyond Google Home or the Google Pixel phone line up, expanding further into the home as they try to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Alexa technology.

If you pay for Google Drive storage, there are some changes rolling out that you need to be aware of going forward.  From now on your Drive subscription will be managed within the Google Play Store like your other subscription apps.  Gone will be the separate purchasing and process for adding storage to your account.  Instead, for Android users, it will all roll up into the Play Store where you can manage all of your subscriptions (like Google Play Music) from one place.

The new process won’t effect anything you have to do as an end user.  Google is migrating accounts to Google Play Store and you should have received an email on this in December.  Once your account is converted over, you will see it as part of your subscriptions in the store.

It has been a good week for Google Home users.  First came the integration with Netflix and Google Photos earlier in the week.  Second, and just yesterday, a slew of new bots were added to Google Home to help you get news, information, how to’s and even play games, all from voice commands to your Home.  The new bots, 34 of them in all, are available under the Services section of the app on your Android phone.  I’m referring to them as bots because you have to specifically tell Home which service to talk to and you get automated information back from that service.  It is much like a chat bot – just using your voice instead.

The list of services is pretty impressive and all of them are enabled by default.  You just have to tell Home which one you want to access.  This is done by saying “Hey Google, let me talk to about ”.  As an example, you can talk to Dominos and track your order or, equally as important, order your saved Easy Order.  Yes the fact you have to tell Home to which service to use is a bit awkward but I suspect that this will improve over time just as Home in general has improved.

Google has pushed a small but important update out to Google PhotoScan, the app that allows you to quickly and easily scan your photographs and upload them to your Google Photos account.  The update, version 1.1 for those keeping score at home, is rolling out now to the Play Store.  On the surface, you won’t really notice any changes to the user experience or any new features to the app.  However, you will notice once you start scanning your photos.  In the original release of the app, scans were limited to 3MP.  That may seem small in in this day of 12MP or more cameras but for scanning old 35mm photos, it worked out just fine.  Google found a way to improve this however and with this new 1.1 version, photos are scanned at 5MP.

Google has been very clear and vocal that one of the primary goals of the new Google Pixel lineup of phones is to lure iPhone users away from iOS and Apple to Android.  While the success of the Pixel and Pixel XL looks strong and the phones are certainly attractive, users moving from one ecosystem to another as they would in this case have one big challenge:  Data migration.  Keeping all your calendar events, photos and videos and contacts are critical for migrating from iOS to Android.  To that end, Google has launched an all new Switch to Android site which outlines exactly what those who want to migrate need to do to assure all their content is backed up.  The key to all of it:  Google Drive.

The step-by-step site has users first download Google Drive onto their iPhone then use the new Backup Wizard built into the app to backup their Contacts, Calendar events, and Photos & Videos.  Once the content that you want to back up is selected, they are all backed up via Google Drive to the respective Google services.  Your contacts go to Google Contacts, your calendar events to Google Calendar and your photos & videos to Google Photos.  Because of limitations in iOS, in order for the backup to work, you must have Google Drive running and in the foreground on your iPhone (iOS doesn’t allow background syncs) and depending on how much data you have, this process could take several hours.  Obviously, use Wi-Fi to do this as it will speed things up (and be cheaper!).