Tag: Android

Google Home has some impressive microphones built into it and can hear you for a good distance away depending on the ambient noise level of your home. Sometimes, however, it would be nice to get some sort of acknowledgement that Home actually heard your command.  Sure you have the swirling lights at the top but what if you aren’t looking at it or are even out of sight of your Home?  Fortunately there is an easy way around this and it all comes down to a setting inside the Home app.

In this How To I’ll show you how to set up your Google Home to give you an audible tone when you start or end a request.

Fitbit has begun rolling out an update to their app for Android and while it provides a few nice updates, the big news is the preview of the new dashboard in the app.  The preview is not enabled by default but there is a banner that will walk you through what’s new in the dashboard and will enable it for you.  It is awesome.  The new dashboard is a far cleaner design with a white background and dials to indicate your activities, steps and other wellness information.  If you are use to the dashboard on the Fitbit website, this is going to look very familiar to you and has the same ability to move things around on the dashboard, just like the website.

Google is in the process of dropping a new app into the Play Store, Google PhotoScan.  As the name suggest, PhotoScan is aimed at making capturing old photos and them storing them electronically (like in Google Photos) painless but in great quality.  The app detects edges, straightens the image, rotates it to the correct orientation, and removes glare.  Then you can save it to your Google Photos account with a single tap.  And remember – if you are using Google Photos and storing photos in High Quality (photos under 16MP really benefit from this) then they don’t count against your Google Drive storage quota.

Using Google PhotoScan is easy.  With the app on your Android phone, point your camera at the photo you want to scan.  In the PhotoScan app, after you line up the photo and tap the shutter button, there will be four dots on the screen.  Line up the camera with those four dots and PhotoScan stitches things together to create a high quality digital image of your photograph.

Twitter has announced changes to their app and policies with the specific aim of cutting down on online abuse and bullying.  The changes will be rolling out over the course of the next few days and will bring a much enhanced mute feature.  This new feature will not only allow you to mute a particular account (which you can already do) but also allow you to block keywords and emoji too.  Notifications can also be muted after this update so if you are a victim of bullying or abuse on the service, you can quite literally turn that person or those words completely off in the app – and make your life a little bit easier.

Bullying and abuse has been a seemingly constant problem for Twitter.  Many individuals have left the service for a wide range of abuse issues from gender, orientation and political views.  Twitter in their update today stated that they know these changes won’t end it overnight but is working to try to cut it down.

We all know how powerful Google search is on our devices.  Whether it is by voice or by typing in a search request in the Search bar or in Chrome, getting to information is quick and easy and makes finding out things on the go simple.  But did you know that you can also do a search via the camera built into your Android phone?  It is a feature that has been there since Marshmallow and for a while was limited to the Google Now launcher.  That has gone away and whether you are on a device using the Google camera app or not, it works.  In fact, I tested it out on three different launchers (Google Now, Nextbit Launcher, Action Launcher) and all three allow you to do this type of searching.  I’m assuming it works with any combination but if you find a launcher or camera app which it doesn’t work, let me know so I can update this post.

Google has announced that a major overhaul of their music streaming service, Google Play Music, is rolling out this week.  The update will bring a significant change to the user interface of the app but there are also a lot of changes happening behind the scenes to make a better overall experience.  What the company is doing is building in Google’s machine learning into the app.  The idea is for it to learn the music you like as well as when you listen to certain types of music so it can make better and more accurate suggestions.

Google Play Music uses machine learning to figure out what music you like and then mixes in signals like location, activity, and the weather along with hand-picked playlists to personalize music for wherever you are and whenever you want tunes. Starting this week on Android, iOS and the web, the new experience will roll out globally (62 countries, to be precise).

This should sound pretty familiar.  Google has been in the process of injecting their machine learning into all of their apps and services over the course of the past year with the aim to have their apps and devices understand you better.  While we tend to think of machine learning in big contextual things (like Google Home for example), having it in straight forward apps like Google Play Music will bring a much richer experience to users too.