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Showing posts from March, 2016

Google April Fools' Day 2016

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April Fools' Day is an important day for Google because there are a lot of hoaxes and crazy features to show. Google Japan announced a Physical Flick Bluetooth keyboard  ( translation ). It's called Furikku and the circuit board and firmware are  open source . The keyboard is actually the hardware version of Google's Japanese input software for Android. "The device consists of a button that users can ‘push’ and also a sensor that detects ‘flick’ actions. There are 12 sensors and 8 complementary action buttons so a total of 20 sensors in the device. This device can be employed by users who are accustomed to typing letters on their smartphones, but not on their desktop keyboards," mentions Google. Google Australia brings Google Search for your socks . "We’re teaming up with retailers across Australia to launch a new range of Searchable Socks — to organise the world’s undergarments and make them universally findable. These new bluetooth-enabled socks are fitted ...

Save Images in Desktop Google Search

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Last year, Google added a feature that allowed you to save image search results and organize them using tags. This feature was only available in the mobile interface, but now you can use it on the desktop too. Just click the "save" button next to an image search result and then click "view saved" to go to google.com/save and manage your saved images. "This feature is currently available in the US when you search for images on desktop and in your mobile browser. To try it out, make sure you're logged into your browser with your Google Account; then you can start image searching and saving," informs Google . The site mentions that the "website links you save using the Save to Google extension for Chrome can also be found here," but I couldn't find this extension. There's a Save to Google Drive extension , but it only saves images and screenshots to Google Drive.

Google Knowledge Graph Cards Add Share Button

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Google's Knowledge Graph cards added a button that lets you share the search results pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or by sending an email. You're actually sending a link to the entire search page, not just to the card. Knowledge Graph cards include a lot of useful information extracted from various web pages and other resources: images, official homepage, social network pages, Wikipedia descriptions, useful facts, events, quotes and more.

Google's Blogs Move to a Custom Domain

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Last week, John Mueller announced that Google is moving all of its blogs to a custom domain: googleblog.com. For example, Gmail's blog has a new URL: gmail.googleblog.com , which replaces gmailblog.blogspot.com. "Google is moving its blogs to a new domain to help people recognize when they're reading an official blog from Google. These changes will roll out to all of Google's blogs over time. The previous address will redirect to the new domain, so your bookmarks and links will continue to work." A long time ago, many people thought that this is an official Google blog and I had to keep explaining that the blog is not affiliated with Google. I added more and more disclaimers, but that's still not enough for everyone. Now that Google's blogs move from blogspot.com to googleblog.com, it's much easier to tell things apart.

Smart Reply in Desktop Google Inbox

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If you're getting a lot of emails and you're tired of writing replies, Google's Inbox service has a feature that suggests 3 short replies. It was first added to the Inbox mobile apps and now it's available in the desktop site . Apparently, 10% of all the replies on mobile already use Smart Reply. Smart Reply uses machine learning to figure out if a short reply is appropriate and then predicts likely responses. "The Smart Reply System is built on a pair of recurrent neural networks, one used to encode the incoming email and one to predict possible responses. The encoding network consumes the words of the incoming email one at a time, and produces a vector (a list of numbers). The second network starts from this thought vector and synthesizes a grammatically correct reply one word at a time, like it's typing it out. Amazingly, the detailed operation of each network is entirely learned, just by training the model to predict likely responses." { Thanks, Jona...

Metronome Card in Google Search

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Google shows a special card when you search for [ metronome ]. The default beat rate is 120 BPM, but you can change the value from 40 to 208 BPM by pressing the "+" and "-" buttons. Google plays a sound, shows an animation and changes the color of the UI, depending on the selected value. According to Wikipedia , "a metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks (beats, clicks) — settable in beats per minute. (...) The metronome is used by musicians to help keep a steady tempo as they play, or to work on issues of irregular timing, or to help internalize a clear sense of timing and tempo." { Thanks, Mukil Elango . }