Category: Google

The Google Payments Center is likely one of the few Google sites that you rarely visit.  It is a central location where you can see all of your payment information such as your recent purchases, your credit cards and shipping addresses, and your subscriptions that you have through Google.  It is a site that, to be fair, you rarely need to use as most of the information in it can be found in the Play Store app or in Google Pay.

That doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t think it is important and over the weekend gave it a heavy Material Design makeover.  The update was a cloud-side push as these things tend to go so there is nothing you need to do on your end.  Just go to https://pay.google.com and you will be dropped into the new & improved Google Payment Center site.

After being announced last month, literally in the middle of the night, Google has now pulled back the covers on the rebooted YouTube Music subscription service as well as the YouTube Red rebranded YouTube Premium.  The two services combined are $11.99 per month and bring you a wealth of music and video content on your Android phone, tablets, PCs, and Chromebooks.

The updated services bring ad-free music and videos to your devices with both original content and official music channels for artists that you can subscribe to and follow.

Google has announced that the Google Sign-in screen that you use to sign into your account will be changing on June 14th.  The updated screen will be more in line with Material Design principles with an updated Google logo, outline of text boxes and everything being centered in the sign-in screen itself.

The Mountain View company has indicated that this change will be available for everyone across all G Suite domains and consumer accounts.

Improved dedicated topic pages in the Google Feed in the Pixel Launcher and the Google app are now in the process of broadly rolling out to users.  The improved feature allows you to select a topic of interest in your feed and get a dedicated page to that topic along with multiple related articles.  The change is a cloud-side change and appears to be rolling out to a wide range of versions of the Google app, including the current 8.5 stable version as well as the beta build which is version 8.6.

You will know that you have received the new update when you look at your Google Feed either in the Pixel Launcher page or by opening the dedicated Google app.  Next to the topic header, if you see a > (right arrow or chevron), then you have the update.

And here we go again…. Google announced, literally in the middle of the night last night, that they are going to rebrand YouTube Red and revamp the YouTube Music app.  It was odd timing to say the least.

YouTube Premium is essentially a rebranded YouTube Red.  You get all the benefits of Red like downloading of content, ad-free content and access to YouTube original content like you do today.  The price is $11.99/month and that includes the new YouTube Music.  This too is similar to what is available today.  If you subscribe to Google Play Music at $9.99/month, you get YouTube Red included.

The new Gmail Smart Compose feature that was announced at Google I/O earlier this week has now gone live as an experimental feature in the new user experience for the service.  Once enabled, you will be able to use Smart Compose as you write emails and can use the suggested text of the email by simply tapping the tab button on your keyboard.

The feature is aimed to make writing emails faster and Google is using AI to look at the content of the email to determine what to suggest next.  It is similar to the Smart Replies found in other Google products, only it is more real time.  To enable it, go to Settings>General in the new Gmail experience and enable Experimental access.  Save your settings and then start composing an email.  You will see the Smart Compose option start providing suggestions as you type your new email.