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Chrome OS 93 is heading to your Chromebook today, and it's all about the details
Tweaks that strengthen, mature, and enhance the overall Chrome experience
Today Google is launching Chrome OS 93 to Chromebooks, just a week after it released Chrome 93 to mobile and desktop platforms. Chromebooks have seen wild success over the last couple of years thanks to Chrome OS being reliable, secure, and easy to use, and Chrome OS 93 adds polish here and there to help you enjoy your Chromebook even more. Here are all the important features and tweaks coming with this update.
Google kicked a FOSS app off the Play Store for linking to its own website
Google isn't messing around when it comes to payment processing
While the Play Store is generally the more accepting and pervasive of the two big mobile application platforms, it still needs a fair amount of moderation to keep out the riff-raff. Malware, spyware, annoying apps that put things like [Free Download] in the title, it's all got to go. But it looks like Google is getting more aggressive in enforcing its more general developer terms, especially when it comes to payments. Case in point: Language Transfer.
Upcoming Chromebook emoji picker gets fresh design ahead of full release
The emoji picker will also have an inline search box for improved discoverability
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It's no secret that emoji play an integral part in today's daily communication. From a user experience point of view, emoji pictographs make up a universally recognized language that adds emotional nuance to conversations. They've been integrated throughout our digital lives, and in 2018, Chrome gained a shortcut to quickly insert them on the desktop. It poses a problem for Chrome OS users, though — clicking on the context menu launches the on-screen keyboard, which is clunky and unintuitive with a mouse. However, that's changing soon as Google is working on a dedicated emoji picker for Chrome OS.
Shortly after starting to test an all-in-one record-and-publish function in the YouTube app, its developers have added another experiment that'll be useful for those of us who'd rather only watch videos. They're working on a button that lets you switch voice search languages right on the input screen. If you're multilingual and like using voice search, this will finally make it possible to search for videos that aren't available in the language you've set up in your YouTube app settings.
Over the course of history, societies have developed their own number systems to suit their own needs. These days, most of the world shares a common base 10 system, but different regions still have their own significant magnitudes. Enter the crore and lakh and a major change on the part of YouTube India to start using those units instead of thousands and millions to count up views, subscribers, likes, and such.
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Google's Assistant newest iteration, which launched with the Pixel 4, has a few tricks up its sleeve, but accessing it has been restricted by some draconian requirements. You need to have a Pixel 4 with gesture navigation, no G Suite account on the same user profile, and everything has to be set to US English. That last limitation will soon be lifted with five new English variants joining in.
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- Google has announced today that Assistant's support for Arabic on phones is expanding to 15 more countries besides Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These are:
Google Assistant's language support was expanding quickly toward the end of 2018, but since the beginning of this year, the rate of additions slowed down considerably. As Google I/O nears, we're sure to see those pick up pace a little. Case in point, Assistant now supports Arabic (Egypt) and (Saudi Arabia). The former appears to be in open beta and available to all, while the latter is in closed beta and only showing for a few people.
Back in March, we reported Google's Discover feed was able to support content in two distinct languages, providing relevant updates to users who spoke different tongues. The company is taking its multilingual abilities even further, as the News app can now handle content in two different languages.
Whether you're curious about the Roman Empire, want to master new romance tongues, or are simply keen to discover a new one, Latin can be an interesting choice. Unfortunately, learning an an extinct language isn't always easy, mostly because there are few people to practice with, but also due to the limited resources available. Thankfully, Duolingo, which is famous for its free mobile language courses, has just added support for Latin.
Being a native Arabic speaker, it never occurred to me how complicated the language is compared to many others. I learned to speak it, read it, and write it ever since I was a kid, so I rarely notice its idiosyncrasies and instead simply think of all of it as second nature. If you come from another background though, Arabic can be a daunting language to learn, but that's exactly what Duolingo has taken on. The service now offers Arabic courses for English speakers in its apps and on its site.
Google Assistant is an incredibly powerful tool in the US, and as of late, the personal helper is getting better all around the globe with an ever-growing number of supported languages and actions. This goes hand in hand with Google's recent announcement that it wants to massively expand Assistant all over the world, which has already led to a plethora of new and improved languages. Now, another round of updated and new voices have arrived for even broader international support.
Google is embracing languages lately. Not only is the Assistant bilingual in dozens of language combinations now, but support for more dialects and variants is spreading through several of the company's apps and services. And that's the case with Discover (aka Google Feed). Bilingual support was mentioned when Discover launched, but only for English and Spanish in the US — although it was already working for English and Hindi in India. Based on tips and evidence we've seen over the past weeks, that support has expanded and is reaching more language combinations.
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- According to an update made to the Language and Locale Support section of the Actions on Google documentation site, these new higher-quality WaveNet voices will start to roll out on March 4th. The new voices provide users of the Actions on Google platform with voices that meet or exceed a 3.6 mean opinion score (i.e., which provide better perceived quality than the previous TTS voices used).
As with most of Google's products, Assistant is an incredibly powerful tool in the United States, but its functionality is limited in other countries. This is understandable, since there are dozens of other major languages worldwide with countless dialects, and speech recognition for each variation can take a while to develop. At Mobile World Congress, Google announced a massive expansion for Assistant's language support.
Most of Google's products support a wide range of languages, and now Drive has two more language options. The company's G Suite blog announced today that Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Forms, and Drive on web now support Burmese and Welsh.
Beta tests for Google Assistant's Polish language support have been going on for several months, so it's no surprise to see the feature officially launch. If you speak Polish, you will now (or soon, at least) be able to use Assistant in that language. Developers can also build Actions on Google in Polish.
Last week, Google officially rolled out bilingual support for Assistant, but as with everything related to Assistant and languages, there were limitations. You can only choose between six main languages (and a few country variants) as the main option, and you're restricted even further when it comes to your secondary language. Turns out there's a small trick to make Assistant understand more than these, but only on your phone if it's set to that other language.
Google's Go line of apps is gradually getting larger, with one of the more recent ones being Google Go, a lite version of the main Google app. The 'Google for Nigeria' event yesterday saw the announcement of webpage dictation, which is said to be arriving "in the coming weeks," for Google Go.
Back in February, Google said that it would be adding 30 more languages to Google Assistant "over the next few months." Of the languages that had been name-dropped at the event, only Hindi and Indonesian have been added, but another has just joined the club: Thai.
Google announced today that Maps is adding 39 previously unsupported languages. Maps is currently used by more than a billion people worldwide, Google says, and the newly-added languages expand its potential userbase by quite a bit.