News Google Introduces a Competitor to GitHub Copilot Codey is based on Google's large PaLM 2 language model and has been trained on a huge set of permissively licensed open-source code as well as on the internal code of Google's own products.
News Google Will Start Deleting Inactive Accounts Later This Year Google announced an updated policy for inactive accounts. Starting this year, if an account has not been used for two years, it can be automatically deleted with all of its content, including Google Workspace data, YouTube, and Google Photos.
News Apple and Google Team Up to Tackle Unwanted Tracking Through Tracking Devices After increasing complaints from users about unwanted surveillance and concerns over devices' safety, the companies announced the development of the new technology that can combat the misuse of Bluetooth devices for location tracking.
News Google Has Officially Introduced Its New Pixel Fold Smartphone The smartphone features a triple-lens rear camera with a 48MP primary camera, a 10.8MP ultra-wide, and a 10.8MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom. There's also a 9.5MP camera on the cover display, and an 8MP camera on the foldable screen.
News Google Now Lets Users Access Their Accounts with Passkeys The new technology uses your device biometrics (either your fingerprint or your face) or its pin to confirm it's you signing in. It basically allows using your device instead of a password for authentication.
BigTech YouTube Will No Longer Run Overlay Ads on Desktop Starting April 6 YouTube will no longer display overlay ads atop videos that users are watching on the desktop app and web browsers, the company announced in a YouTube Help forum post. This ad format has long been unavailable on mobile devices, too.
News Google's Magic Eraser Feature Is Coming to iPhones and More Androids The Magic Eraser feature will now be available on the Google Photos app to all Google One subscribers on both iOS and Android devices. All Pixel smartphone owners will have access to the feature without having to sign up for a paid Google One subscription.
News Google to Blur Explicit Images in Search Results by Default SafeSearch will soon become the default setting for all users, even if they don't have the SafeSearch filtering technology turned on. Before this change, the filter was already enabled by default for signed-in users under 18.
News Google's New AI Model Can Generate Music from Text Descriptions Google has unveiled MusicLM, an artificial intelligence system that can generate high-fidelity music of any genre from text descriptions given by users. However, Google has no plans to make the neural network publicly available yet.
BigTech Google Acquires AI Avatar Startup Alter for $100 Million TechCrunch reported that Google paid about $100 million to acquire Alter. The acquisition took place about two months ago without a public announcement, but the tech giant has already confirmed the purchase.
News Google Expands Eco-Friendly Routing Across European Countries Last year, this feature was available for residents of the United States and Canada, offering routes with the least energy consumption. Eco-friendly routing is now available across most European countries.
News Google Launches an Educational Website for Kids Learning to Read After selecting a story, the kid starts reading into the microphone of a connected device. Read words are highlighted in blue, whereas mispronounced words are underlined in red. After you click on the underlined word, a virtual assistant named Diya pronounces it.
News YouTube's Picture-in-Picture Mode Is Now Available for iPhone and iPad Users YouTube announced that it has begun rolling out its picture-in-picture feature to all iOS users, allowing them to close the YouTube app when watching something and continue to view the content in a small floating window.
News Google's Switch to Android App Now Supports Android 12 Phones At first, the app was only limited to Google's Pixel devices, but now it will also be easier for Android 12 phones owners to move from an iPhone to their new Android device.
News Google to Shut Down Hangouts This November Google is beginning a gradual transition from Hangouts to Google Chat for all users. According to the company, it is already outdated, and the transition to Google Chat will open new ways to communicate and work together.
News Google Chrome Will Automatically Change Stolen Passwords If Chrome detects that a certain password should be changed, the user will be prompted to have it changed automatically by pressing a single button in a pop-up window. The feature is powered by Google Assistant and Google Duplex technology.
News Google Introduced an App That Lets iOS Users Wirelessly Switch to Android While switching from one Android smartphone to another is relatively easy, transferring data from iPhone to Android is rather complicated since it requires creating backups to Google Drive and manual data recovery.
News Google Adds In-Meeting Emoji Reactions to Google Meet The chosen emoji reactions will be shown live to both the host and other participants over a member's video tile (or alongside their name) or in a list on the left of the screen. Emoji reactions will finally arrive in April.
News Google Will Make Search Dark Theme Fully Black The black search background color could potentially help save battery life on smartphones and laptops. However, it won't make any big difference since users do not spend much time in Search.
News Google Is Working on an AR Headset Codenamed Project Iris Like upcoming headsets from Meta and Apple, Google's headset uses outward-facing cameras to bring computer graphics into the real world, creating a more immersive mixed reality experience.
News Google Abandons FLoC and Replaces Third-Party Cookies With Topics With Topics, the new concept will assign users five interests per week based on their web activity. These interests will be stored for up to three weeks. To do this, Google created a list of about 350 topics available in its advertising taxonomy.
News Indian Regulator Ordered an Antitrust Probe Against Google The Competition Commission of India (CCI) suspects Google is violating the country's antitrust laws. The investigation should help determine whether Google imposes any discriminatory conditions or price on digital news publishers.
News Google Shares a List of the Best Chrome Extensions of 2021 On its official blog, the Google team has shared a list of their favorite extensions for the Chrome browser that helped people stay connected, productive, and simply have fun throughout 2021.
News TikTok Becomes the World's Most Popular Website Cloudflare's latest analytical report indicates that TikTok became the most visited website in 2021. The Chinese social network managed to overtake the domain of Google.com, which was leading in 2020.
News Google's Year in Search 2021 Reveals Popular Search Trends The company also named the main trends, events, and heroes of 2021. The rating was compiled based on users' search queries over the past year.
