Tag: Google

With the release of Google Allo earlier this week, Google also released an increadbly powerful feature inside the app.  Google Assistant, as the name suggests, aims to give you information, weather and even play games (and tell a joke or two) all within Allo.  Indeed, with Allo itself still needing some fleshing out, Google Assistant is by far the killer feature of the app and gives us a glimpse as to what we can expect as the company starts rolling this out to other devices like Google Home.

One of the great feature of Assistant is the ability to sign up for news, weather and other information in a subscription that is delivered to you daily.  It is a great way to stay up-to-date with the latest information on a topic of your choice.  In this How To I’ll show you how to subscribe and manage your subscriptions within Assistant.

Happy Birthday Android!  Back on September 23, 2008, Android 1.o made its debut with T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream making it commercially available for the first time.  As we who love the platform know, it has grown exponentially in features, performance and functionality over the past 8 years and it is exciting to think of what the next 8 years hold in store for it.

To be fair, there is a lot of confusion on the Interwebs on the exact birthday of Android but it seems to come down to two dates.  The first, September 23, 2008 as I mentioned before being the commercially available date.  There is also the date of November 5, 2007.  That is the day that the beta of Android 1.0 was made available.  It seems pretty clear in Google’s mind however that the September 23rd date is the one of record and clearly is the one they are celebrating.

After weeks of anticipation and waiting, Google finally pulled the trigger and launched Google Allo, their new messaging app.  The company had indicated it would be available this summer and as expected, it launched today (late last night technically) on the last day of summer.  Promise kept!

The new app that is “a new smart messaging app for Android and iOS that helps you say more and do more right in your chats. Google Allo can help you make plans, find information, and express yourself more easily in chat. And the more you use it, the more it improves over time.”

Leveraging phone numbers of contacts in your contacts list, you can SMS or, if they are using Allo, rich message them with larger text, inked photos and stickers.  If you message someone and they are not using Allo (on SMS), they will get a small prompt to download the app if they are on Android but they don’t necessarily have to do so.  Allo can be just a SMS app if you so choose.

The real killer feature in Google Allo however is Google Assistant that is built into it.

There are a lot of travel apps in the Play Store but the newest one, Google Trips, is mighty impressive.  The app launched earlier this week and aims to be the one app you go to for information about your trip and to help you plan it.  Best of all (besides being free) is that it can work completely offline, saving you data usage while you are traveling internationally.  The leverages travel reservations received in Gmail to determine where you are going on a trip and stores that information in the Reservations section of the app.  There you can see your car, hotel and air travel all in one place.  There are other sections too such as Things to Do.  This gives you recommendations on things around where you will be traveling that you can do to get to explore the city you are visiting.  Once you find something you like, tap the star icon for that things and it will be added to your Saved places so you can keep track of them and plan them into your trip.

Google has made a significant change in the background on Google Drive, bringing natural language processing to the search feature of the web-based part of the service.  Essentially what you can now do is search for things using natural language instead of specific file names.  This is the same technology that is used in Google Search to help you find things in a more natural language style.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fancy way of saying “search like you talk.” You can type things like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.” Drive will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results. Drive NLP will get better with each query — so keep on searching. 😉

This new feature is likely to be a big time saver for those who have a lot of files in Drive.

Android Pay continues to grow at an impressive rate with more banks supporting the pay service all the time.  Today there are an additional 44 new banks throughout the United States and the UK that have been added.  The complete list of financial institutions supporting the service is well over 100 now ranging from large national banks to regional and state banks.  The update today focused primarily on those regional and state banks.  The good news is, regardless of the size of your banking institution, check the list as it is increasingly likely that it is supported.