Tag: Google

Microsoft has begun rolling out a nice update to their Bing search app for Android.  The update brings improvements around the travel results for places to go and the best time to go to those places.  This is very similar to Google search which has a bar graph that shows you when a location is busiest.  Along with the improved time suggestions, the app also gives you tips and guides and one-tap directions to the location from your current location.

While those of you who use Google search may give a shrug of the shoulders at this being added to Bing but for those who depend on the Microsoft

Bing Local Travel Results

search solution, this is certainly good news.  Bing has continued to make solid strides in the search space over the past two years and while it is certainly behind Google in overall usage, those who are deeply tied in to the Microsoft ecosystem continue to leverage it for their search needs.

In addition to the new location information, this update also gives warning about malicious websites and has a homepage gallery filer.  This feature allows you to filter and find your favorite Bing homepage images.  If you haven’t checked out the daily images from the site, you are missing a treat.  Some of them are spectacular.

If you have the app installed then you can expect the update to hit your phone over the course of the next few days.

Google has rolled out an update to Google Drive that brings a new, Machine Learning-backed Quick Access panel to the app.  Machine Learning is something that Google is rapidly deploying in all of their products, from G Suite to Google Cloud Platform.  The good news is that everyday users can also gain the advantages of ML in the everyday apps they provide.

This feature rolled out a few months ago for those who are G Suite customers and principally what it does is use a wide set of patterns to determine the files you need to access quickly.  This isn’t just your most recent files as that’s fairly mundane these days.  No, this looks at things like your calendar or activity on your Drive to bubble up the files you are likely to need.

Google Drive Quick Access

For Quick Access, however, we constructed thousands of simple features from the various signals above (for instance, the timestamps of the last 20 edit events on a document would constitute 20 simple input features), and combined them with the power of deep neural networks to learn from the aggregated activity of our users. By using deep neural networks we were able to develop accurate predictive models with simpler features and less feature engineering effort.

It is a pretty impressive model and frankly, it works just as impressively.  Looking at a meeting I had on my calendar, it bubbled up a Docs file that I had been using for notes around this particular meeting.  I didn’t have to search for it.  As you use Drive and other Google apps like G Suite (which includes the likes of Gmail, Calendar and of course Docs, Sheets and Slides), it will learn you better to give you more personalized results.

For Quick Access to work in Google Drive, you need to have the latest version of the app on your phone or tablet.  The feature should be enabled by default but if not, you can go into Setting to enable it (or disable it). You can read more about it on the Google Research Blog.

Productivity enhancing add-ons are going to be coming to Gmail later this year.  At Google Cloud Next today, the company announced that developers will soon be able to create add-ons that allow users to immediately jump to another app from within Gmail to complete a task or perform another task.  The idea is to increase productivity as you can stay within one app, Gmail, yet complete other tasks from another app.

The example used was from Intuit where someone could send an invoice to a customer right from within Gmail.  Using Machine Learning to figure out that the email was about a bill, users will be able with a tap to move into Quickbooks to create and send the invoice without ever having to leave the mail app itself.  Salesforce would be another example as you could add a contact to your contacts list within SalesForce right from Gmail.

Google is taking on the conference room and collaboration in a big, bold new way.  I’ve already told you about Hangout Meet but add to that Google Jamboard.  Jamboard is aimed at being a whiteboard with collaboration across multiple sites with deep integration into G Suite for file collaboration and sharing.  The 55″ 4K monitor comes with a stylus for interactions (it’s passive so no pairing required) and can even distinguish between the stylus and your finger.  Think of drawing with the stylus and erasing with a finger.

Google states it is a merge of digital and physical creativity and having seen a demo and using it at Google Cloud Next today, it is mighty impressive.

Google Hangouts as we know it today is radically changing.  Not only is the app getting a major UI makeover, it is being split into two separate apps as Google repositions the app for the Enterprise.  I’m attending Google Cloud Next this week and the announcements around Google Hangouts are pretty exciting.  First, the app is being split into two distinct apps:  Hangouts Meet which is designed to be a collaboration and conferencing solution, and Hangouts Chat which is designed to be a Google Drive integrated chat and collaboration tool.  Together, along G Suite, provide a seamless way for people both in a company and outside of it to meet, collaborate and share information while removing the challenge of getting people involved with a simple one-tap ability to join a call.

The changes are aimed at cutting down the friction that enterprises have when it comes to setting up meetings and collaboration where content can be easily and freely shared.  These, tied to the new Jamboard whiteboard solution will allow the free flowing of content and information amongst team members.

App Shortcuts, the ability to tap-and-hold to get to specific parts of an app in Android Nougat 7.1, continues to grow and Google is catching up too.  The latest update to Google Play Newsstand now supports the shortcuts, allowing you to quickly get to your curated news, digest of news, Magazines and items you have marked for reading later.  Newsstand undergone a lot of changes in the past six months, most of which have been pretty good.  The big knock I had on the app was that in the redesign, getting to your magazine subscriptions became confusing and not-so-easy to figure out at first.  It’s still that way but with the shortcut now available, it makes it easier to get to them.

As readers probably know, in order for app shortcuts to work, you must be running Android Nougat 7.1 or higher.  That means it is almost completely for Pixel and Nexus devices as very few other devices from other manufactures have 7.1 as of yet.