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See the world in your language with Google Translate
July 29, 2015
The
Google Translate app
already lets you instantly visually translate printed text in seven languages. Just open the app, click on the camera, and point it at the text you need to translate—a street sign, ingredient list, instruction manual, dials on a washing machine. You'll see the text transform live on your screen into the other language. No Internet connection or cell phone data needed.
Today, we’re updating the Google Translate app again—expanding instant visual translation to 20 more languages (for a total of 27!), and making real-time voice translations a lot faster and smoother—so even more people can experience the world in their language.
Instantly translate printed text in 27 languages
We
started out
with seven languages—English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish—and today we're adding 20 more. You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai. (Or, try snapping a pic of the text you’d like translated—we have a total of 37 languages in camera mode.)
To try out the new languages, go to the Google Translate app, set “English” along with the language you’d like to translate, and click the camera button; you'll be prompted to download a small (~2 MB) language pack for each.
Ready to see all of these languages in action?
And how exactly did we get so many new languages running on a device with no data connection? It’s all about convolutional neural networks (whew)—geek out on that over on our
Research blog
.
Have a natural, smoother conversation—even with a slower mobile network
In many emerging markets, slow mobile networks can make it challenging to access many online tools - so if you live in an area with unreliable mobile networks, our other update today is for you. In addition to instant visual translation, we’ve also improved our voice conversation mode (enabling real-time translation of conversations across 32 languages), so it’s even faster and more natural on slow networks.
These updates are coming to both Android and iOS, rolling out over the next few days.
Translate Community helps us get better every day
On top of today’s updates, we’re also continuously working to improve the quality of the translations themselves and to add new languages. A year ago this week, we launched
Translate Community
, a place for multilingual people from anywhere in the world to provide and correct translations. Thanks to the millions of language lovers who have already pitched in—more than 100 million words so far!—
we've been updating our translations
for over 90 language pairs, and plan to update many more as our community grows.
We’ve still got lots of work to do: more than half of the content on the Internet is in English, but only around 20% of the world’s population speaks English. Today’s updates knock down a few more language barriers, helping you communicate better and get the information you need.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
Everything in its right place
July 27, 2015
When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes. Here’s more about what you can expect:
A more focused Google+ experience
Google+ is quickly becoming a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them. In line with that focus, we’re continuing to add new features like
Google+ Collections
, where you can share and enjoy posts organized by the topics you care about. At the same time, we’ll also move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+. For example, many elements of Google+ Photos have been moved into the new Google Photos app, and we’re well underway putting location sharing into Hangouts and other apps, where it really belongs. We think changes like these will lead to a more focused, more useful, more engaging Google+.
Using Google without a Google+ profile
People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.
So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. YouTube will be one of the first products to make this change, and you can learn more
on their blog
. As always, your underlying Google Account won’t be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles. And for people who already created Google+ profiles but don’t plan to use Google+ itself, we’ll offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.
You’ll see these changes roll out in stages over several months. While they won’t happen overnight, they’re right for Google’s users—both the people who are on Google+ every single day, and the people who aren’t.
Posted by Bradley Horowitz, VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing
Rising to the climate challenge
July 27, 2015
In less than five months, policymakers from around the world will gather in Paris to finalize a new global agreement on combating climate change. Already, many governments are putting forth ambitious emissions reduction goals. And companies are taking action, too, by reducing their own footprints and investing in clean energy.
Reaching a strong deal in Paris is an absolute and urgent necessity. The data is clear and the science is beyond dispute: a warming planet poses enormous threats to society.
Public health experts recently
warned
that climate change threatens to “undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health,” through forces like extreme weather, drought, malnutrition, and disease. The U.S. government has asserted that climate change poses “immediate risks to U.S. national security,” as increased natural disasters and humanitarian crises fuel instability and violence. And many studies have revealed that critical infrastructure, like electricity and water, is vulnerable to rising sea levels and intensifying storms.
Climate change is one of the most significant global challenges of our time. Rising to that challenge involves a complex mix of policy, technology, and international cooperation. This won’t be easy, but Google is committed to doing its part.
Google has been carbon neutral since 2007. Our data centers, the physical infrastructure behind web services used by billions of people, now get 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of electricity, as compared to five years ago. We are also the
biggest
corporate purchaser of renewable power on the planet. Just today at the White House,
we pledged to triple those purchases
over the next decade. In addition, we're a major climate-minded investor, so far committing more than $2 billion to clean energy projects, from America’s largest wind farm to Africa’s largest solar power plant.
We're serious about environmental sustainability not because it’s trendy, but because it’s core to our values and also makes good business sense. After all, the cheapest energy is the energy you don’t use in the first place. And in many places clean power is cost-competitive with conventional power.
We’re making progress, but averting catastrophic climate change will require significant investment and bold innovations. Google and our private-sector peers are ready to lead. But something fundamental is required: clear policy. The global business community needs certainty to bring climate solutions to scale. We need the world’s political leaders to confirm that investments in clean energy are sound, and that the laws and policies meant to enable such investment will be designed for the long term and rooted in what science tells us needs to be done.
It’s encouraging to see the world’s major economies set ambitious climate targets, but it’s time to get a strong international climate agreement on the books. This December in Paris, it’s imperative that policymakers reach a deal that moves us toward a zero-carbon economy. That’s the kind of future that we’re committed to helping build, and that future generations deserve.
Posted by Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman
Through the Google lens: Search trends July 17-24
July 24, 2015
Anyone up for a look back at the last week on Google Search? We are! Read on to find out what the world was looking for this week.
Bad Blood
Phew, where to start with this one. Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj had a spat over VMA nominations (Taylor was
nominated for Video of the Year
; Nicki was not), worked through it and made up -- all on Twitter. It was a good lesson in the art of the
subtweet
, as well as the “sincere apology after responding to a subtweet that wasn’t directly about you” tweet.
Searches about the incident
topped 500,000.
But Minaj v. Swift wasn’t the only music-related drama to make the list of Trending Searches. Meek Mill, hip hop artist and Nicki Minaj’s significant other,
started a Twitter rant
of his own, alleging that rapper Drake doesn’t write his own material and inspiring more than
a million searches
. The two artists haven’t settled up yet, so stay tuned for more on that front.
Last but not least, country stars Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert are calling it quits after four years of marriage and guess what — they both
had stuff to say
about it on Twitter. More than
1 million searchers
took to Google to find out more.
But wait, there’s more
It was the week of the sequel. (The weequel?) James Bond is back -- the trailer for the upcoming “Spectre” was released this week, which got more than 100,000 people searching for the movie. And nearly as surprising as the idea of a shark-filled tornado itself, the Sharknado is back. “Sharknado 3” -- featuring 90s all-stars Tara Reid and Ian Ziering -- aired on Wednesday night and pulled in a
cool 500,000 searches
.
Speaking of all-stars (and also of the 90s) remember the days when an NBA superstar could star in a wide-release film with his Looney Tunes pals? Well, it’s happening again. This time, it’s not Michael Jordan, but Lebron James who inked a deal with Warner Bros. The company announced the partnership on Wednesday,
leading to 200,000 searches
. Reports suggest that while Michael Jordan will be replaced, Bugs Bunny will play himself, though there has been speculation about a case of cartoon patellar tendonitis he’s been coping with quietly for years.
Posted by Megan Slack, who searched this week for [public pools in San Francisco].
Five ways we’re celebrating the Special Olympics and #ADA25
July 24, 2015
"Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt." -Special Olympics Athlete Oath
Standing in Soldier Field in Chicago, 47 years ago, Eunice Shriver kicked off the first Special Olympics in history--1,000 people with intellectual disabilities from the U.S. and Canada competed in track & field, swimming and diving. Even though it was a small inaugural event, its historical impact--giving a platform to the civil rights struggles of people with disabilities that were so often overlooked-- was massive. The Games were meant to give children with cognitive disabilities, in Eunice’s words, “the chance to play, the chance to compete and the chance to grow.”
Ambitious, inclusive thinking like Eunice’s is contagious, and has inspired us to support this year’s Special Olympics World Games as part of the
Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities.
Launched in May, this effort is focused on supporting the development of assistive technologies for people with disabilities around the world with
$20 million in Google.org grants.
This weekend, to mark the Games as well as the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, landmark legislation that advanced the civil rights of people with disabilities when it was signed into law in 1990, we’re honoring the community in the following ways:
Google Doodle.
We’ve created a homepage Doodle that shows a track inspired by the Special Olympics World Games’ "
circle of inclusion
,” featuring athletes of all backgrounds. In the spirit of getting moving, since we've heard from users that they love seeing doodles on the go, we're now starting to make them easier to see and share on our mobile search results in addition to desktop and the Google app.
Special Olympics World Games.
Over the next nine days, the Special Olympics World Games will draw more than half a million spectators to cheer on 7,000 athletes from 177 countries in events from judo to powerlifting to kayaking and more. We’re powering the World Games’ social media nerve center, contributing as a financial supporter and are packing more than 300 Googlers into the stands.
Cheer an athlete.
If you’re in Los Angeles, come visit us from July 25 until August 2 at the World Games Festival Space at USC’s Alumni Park to support the athletes. For those who can’t make it in person, you can visit
g.co/WorldGames2015
to send a cheer to the athletes. Every day during the competition, we’ll decorate the dorm walls of the athletes with your cheers to encourage them to “be brave in the attempt.”
Portraits, like these at the National Portrait Gallery featuring leaders Judy Heumann and Ed Roberts, who have campaigned tirelessly for the rights of people with disabilities and Tatyana McFadden, who inspires athletes today, will decorate Washington, D.C. this weekend. See the
photo gallery
Painting the town.
In Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, we’re marking the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. From men and women like Judy Heumann and Ed Roberts, who campaigned tirelessly for the rights of people with disabilities, to President George H.W. Bush, who signed the ADA into law in 1990, we’re telling the stories of 10 great leaders who have fought -- and continue to fight -- for equal rights of people living with disabilities. We’ve installed massive portraits on the stairs of historic landmarks around the nation’s capital and in L.A.’s Grand Park.
Audio description available
here
Telling stories.
We’re featuring the little-known history of a number of unsung heroes of the ADA movement at
g.co/ADA
. While people with disabilities benefit from their hard-won battles with every curb cut street corner and closed-caption film, their names are not widely known. We’d like to change that.
Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director Google.org
Neon prescription... or rather, New transcription for Google Voice
July 23, 2015
You may have been there before...open your voicemail transcriptions in Google Voice to find that at times they aren’t completely intelligible. Or, they are humorously intelligible. Either way, they might not have been the message the caller meant to leave you.
So, we asked users if they would kindly share some of their voicemails for research and system improvements. Thanks to those who participated, we are happy to announce an improved voicemail system in Google Voice and Project Fi that delivers more accurate transcriptions. Using a (deep breath)
long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network
(whew!), we cut our transcription errors by 49%.
To start receiving improved voicemail transcriptions, you don't need to do a thing -- just continue to use Google Voice as you have been. For those not using Google Voice but want to give it a try, sign up for a
Google Voice
(or
Google Voice Lite
) account
here
, it’s quick and easy to get started.
Many thanks to the Google Voice users who shared their voicemails, they really helped us make the product better. While this is a big improvement, it is just the beginning and with your input, we will continue improving voicemail transcriptions over time. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to hearing what you link—er, think!
Posted by Zander Danko, Software Engineer
Through the Google lens: Search trends July 10-16
July 17, 2015
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a good, old-fashioned Search trends round up. Read on to see what the world wanted to know this week.
To Pluto and Beyond
It may have lost its planetary title, but Pluto officially became the most distant solid object to be visited by spacecraft as NASA’s New Horizons successfully completed its “flyby” this week. The mission to explore the dwarf giant took a mere nine years and 3 billion miles of space travel and has already returned some truly incredible high-resolution images of Pluto and its moons, including the
most epic vacation Instagram
of all time.
Searches for news
about the mission
topped 5 million
, plus another 100,000+ searches for photos.
Oh baby
In other historic and out of this world news,
Louis Tomlinson
is the first member of One Direction to announce he’s going to be a dad. While this was likely upsetting news for many 1D fans, it didn’t stop the searches--Louis racked up
more than 500,000
of them this week. And, we’ve all got Jimmy Fallon to thank for this week’s
most disgusting search trend
, a truly horrifying finger injury called
ring avulsion
. Fallon, who was sporting a bandaged hand from behind "The Tonight Show" desk, explained that he had surgery following a freak accident involving a kitchen counter and his wedding ring. Searchers took to Google to find out more and with search interest in images of ring avulsion up 50x over the last week, we’re willing to bet at least a few of them probably wish they hadn’t.
Awards season...again
Nominations for the
2015 Emmy Awards
were announced this week, inspiring more than 200,000 searches. Gone but definitely not forgotten "Parks and Recreation" was the most searched Emmy nominee for a comedy series, though
Amy Schumer
(whose new movie "Trainwreck" opens today) edged out Amy Poehler as the most searched lead actress in a comedy. In a potential preview of the 2016 Emmy Awards,
Rachel McAdams
, who co-stars in the new season of HBO’s "True Detective," was searched more than 50,000 times this week.
It was a good week all around, and to play us out, we recommend
Wilco’s new album
, Star Wars. The surprise, free-to-download release this week resulted in more than
50,000 searches
--and a lot of excited Tweedy fans.
Posted by Megan Slack, who searched this week for [ring avulsion].
Dive into Ocean Week at Camp Google
July 13, 2015
Today is the start of Camp Google—an online summer camp built to spark and satisfy kids’ curiosities, with four weeks of live adventures for students ages 7-10. This post comes to us from Sylvia Earle, marine biologist and Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic and the host of the first week of Camp Google. Tune in to Sylvia’s
live event at 12 p.m. PT
today
. -Ed.
The ocean first got my attention during a family visit to a New Jersey beach when I was three years old—a wave knocked me over! At age 12, a move to the Florida coast made the ocean my backyard, and I loved the abundance of life there—every day I encountered new creatures like starfish, sponges, horseshoe crabs, seaweed, and a wondrous array of small fish that I’d never seen before. I knew from then on that when I grew up I would be a scientist so I could keep exploring, no matter what.
Now I get to share my love for the ocean with a new generation of adventurers as part of Camp Google, a new online camp for curious kids, starting. During each of the four weeks of Camp Google, kids 7-10 can explore different subjects by joining live adventures—from the depths of the Atlantic to the top of one of the world’s most active volcanoes—and doing fun science projects. Today at 12 p.m. PT, National Geographic diver Erika Bergman and I will take kids on the first adventure—a
live dive
in the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll head to the northernmost part of Florida Reef Tract, the most extensive living coral reef system in North America. Whether it be the Hammerhead Reef or shipwrecks like the Jay Scutti, it will be exciting to see what we’ll find down there!
After the dive, kids can get hands-on with a range of activities to help them understand the science behind what they’ve seen underwater. The activities are designed by the Google engineers who map the oceans with Google Earth, and can be done with simple household supplies. For example, we’ll
learn about buoyancy
and how things float in the ocean in an experiment with eggs, water and salt, and we’ll explore how dolphins use sounds to see underwater by
building a sonar system
. As kids complete these projects, they’ll earn camp badges to celebrate the new skills they learned, like conquering echolocation (not bad for summer vacation!). The activities are designed for kids to do on their own, in groups with their friends, or with their families.
Following Ocean Week, kids can jump into Space Week with a NASA astronaut and
VSauce
where they will help cook up space food and learn how astronauts eat in space. After that, they’ll head to Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park with a National Park Ranger and
Derek Muller
to learn more about how volcanoes form. And camp ends in style with Music Week, where kids can jam alongside
Zendaya
to learn about why music makes us want to bust a move. We hosts can't wait to explore with you this summer, wherever you might be!
The ocean is vast and a lot of it is unexplored—every time I dive into the ocean there’s the possibility of finding something new. I’m excited to share this spirit of discovery with kids everywhere this summer. I hope through our dive and the rest of Camp Google, we can inspire kids to continue asking questions... and get out there to find answers.
Update
July 15:
We heard that some of you weren't able to see the live stream—sorry about the rocky waters. But you can now catch the video at
http://goo.gl/7pJJUv
. After you've heard from Sylvia and Erika, you can learn a bit more about buoyancy and try to
make things float yourself
!
Posted by Sylvia Earle, your first host of Camp Google
(Cross-posted on the
Google for Education Blog
)
Through the Google lens: Search trends July 3-9
July 10, 2015
This week people had the goal of searching for info on the U.S. victory in the Women’s World Cup, as well as a hat trick of technical difficulties at three major organizations. Let’s kick off the trending topics on Google this week:
Victory for the U.S. women
The U.S. Women’s National team claimed a 5-2 victory over Japan in the final of the World Cup this week, and took home a slew of searches along with their trophy. In fact, U.S. search interest in the final match surpassed interest in Game 6 of this year’s NBA Finals! Keeper
Hope Solo
and forward
Alex Morgan
topped the trends charts on Sunday with more than 1 million and 500,000+ searches, respectively. But people were also interested in
midfielder Carli Lloyd
, who scored a hat trick in the final, including one goal from midfield that sent searches for “carli lloyd goal” spiking more than 1,000 percent. The team was honored with a
ticker-tape parade
in New York City today.
Ground to a halt
Wednesday, a slew of technical issues caused trouble across the U.S., starting with United Airlines. A network outage grounded planes for more than an hour, affecting
almost 5,000 flights
, and frustrated travelers turned to Google to learn more, making the airline the top searched term on Wednesday with
more than 1 million searches
. Meanwhile, trading was suspended for hours at the New York Stock Exchange after a software glitch. Top questions during the outage included “How many times has the NYSE closed?” and “When was the last time the NYSE suspended trading?” Completing the triumvirate of tech troubles, the Wall Street Journal’s website crashed this week as well. The (sort of?) good news is that the three incidents seem to be unrelated to each other—or to hackers.
From plane delays to train delays: In the U.K. Thursday, a strike by London Underground workers caused the first complete shutdown of the Tube in over a decade. As Londoners trudged home or crowded into buses, searchers asked “How much do tube drivers earn?” The strike was over a failed agreement about pay and a new “night Tube” service scheduled to start running in September.
Comic-Con
The annual Comic-Con International started yesterday, bringing comic, superhero and sci-fi fans together in San Diego, Calif. for a long weekend of panels, events and other celebrations of all things (proud) nerd. The top Comic-Con topics this week include “Doctor Who” and the new “Black Ops III: Zombies” video game, but there are
movie trailers and TV show previews
to appeal to even the least geeky among us. A new clip from the final installment in the “Hunger Games” movie franchise drew
50,000+ searches
, while the new trailer for the live-action
“Goosebumps” movie
coming next year has already garnered
more than 6 million views
on YouTube.
Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, who searched for [flights from sf to rome]
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