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New Google Photos interface tweaks make it easier to access Lens tools
Tap the Lens icon or scroll down to easily spot your options
The Google Lens tool is fantastic for quickly grabbing relevant info from photos. Now it's getting a little easier to use if you're a Google Photos devotee. Our readers have spotted a few new tools when you tap the Lens icon while viewing a single item in the official Google Photos app, or when you scroll down to use the more expanded photo info panel. It's hard to pin down when these features went live, but it appears to be within the last couple of weeks.
At Google's event in New Delhi, the company announced that it was launching website dictation for Google Go. We first heard about this during the Nigeria event a month ago, where the feature was said to arrive "in the coming weeks." Looks like we've hit that ever-so-helpful marker.
Google Text-to-speech isn't an application that most of us interact with on a daily basis, but it's very useful to the right audience. We don't often see new languages instilled here, with the last time being back in October with Filipino and Greek, but Google has just added support for Estonian, Romanian, and Slovak.
Get ready for the little person living inside your phone and speaker to sound a lot more life-like. Google believes it has reached a new milestone in the quest to make computer-generated speech indistinguishable from human speech with Tacotron 2, a system that trains neural networks to generate eerily natural-sounding speech from text, and they have the samples to prove it.
Google employees Natalie Hammel and Lorraine Yurshansky, who go by Nat & Lo for their series of informative Google tour videos, are at it again. This time the pair are demonstrating the recent improvements to Google's Text-To-Speech engine (TTS), which many of our readers have already experienced. Since synthesized, human-style voice functions are part of the biggest new trend in usability and gadgets, it's kind of a big deal.
Your phone has been able to talk to you for years, but it started out sounding like a computerized toaster with laryngitis. Google has improved its text to speech (TTS) voice over the years, and a new version is rolling out now. The change is fairly dramatic, with the new voice sounding much more natural and pleasant.
Updates to Google's Text-to-Speech app aren't always interesting, but today's bump actually brings with it two new languages. For those waiting for Hindi and Indonesian language support, it's your lucky day.
Text-to-speech is one of those little pieces of an operating system that not many people use, but which is indispensable for those who do. Now if your first language is Japanese, you've got the option to play out text on your phone with Google's first-party Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine. The relevant app is on the Play Store and was updated today, so you might not have immediate access to it thanks to Google's rollout system.
Google's Text-to-Speech app isn't exactly one that grabs headlines, but it's certainly useful for those who rely on it. Today it gets a little more useful as Google has added a handful of languages for its speech output support. The latest update adds support for selecting and speaking text in Dutch, Polish, and Russian, and better support for at least some dialects of English spoken in India has been added as well.
I love Update Wednesdays, and today we've already seen pretty decent updates to several Google apps. As you've already seen, Google Play Games was updated to v1.5, but the one I'm excited about the most is, without a doubt, Google TTS v3.0, which made a jump today from v2.4.
Text-to-speech engines read text aloud, saving users from having to read it themselves. Google's TTS offering comes pre-installed on numerous Android devices, and like much of the software previously shipped as part of Android, it's now ready to spread its wings in the Play Store. Here it's available to far more users, as it can now be installed on devices that don't come with the software pre-installed (pictured below -left). In contrast, on the Nexus 5, Google TTS is apparently already installed and unremovable (pictured below - right).
Improving on existing TTS technology, Loquendo (a Nuance company) is showing the world that "even computers can show their feelings," with a huge array of TTS engines that are not only more advanced, but significantly more dynamic than existing alternatives.
A fresh version of Google Translate hit the Market today. Conversation mode (direct speech to speech translation) now works in 14 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. Also new is a personal dictionary, the ability to correct voice input before having it translated, and pinch zoom support for getting a close up of the translated text (Chinese symbols can get surprisingly complicated).