Google | TechCrunch

Google pauses its experiment to expand real-money games on the Play Store

Ivan Mehta — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 13:14:34 +0000

Google said today that it globally paused its experiment that aimed to allow new kinds of real-money games on the Play Store, citing the challenges that come with the lack of a central authority to approve such apps in some regions. In January, the company said it would start allowing real-money apps widely in June […]

Google is making your movie and TV reviews visible under a new profile page

Ivan Mehta — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 09:35:36 +0000

Google is making reviews of all your movies, TV shows, books, albums and games visible under one profile page starting June 24, according to an email sent to users last month. These profiles are also searchable through Google searches, which can lead to users’ being profiled based on their likes and dislikes. The company launched […]

Meta AI removes block on election-related queries in India while Google still applies limits

Ivan Mehta — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 10:23:21 +0000

Meta AI removes restrictions around answering election-related queries in India while Google is still restricting them.

Google brings Gemini mobile app to India with support for 9 Indian languages

Jagmeet Singh — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 05:14:14 +0000

Google has released its dedicated AI mobile app Gemini in India — over four months after its debut in the U.S. — with support for nine Indian languages alongside English. The Gemini mobile app in India supports nine Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. This lets users in the country […]

Perplexity now displays results for temperature, currency conversion and simple math, so you don’t have to use Google

Ivan Mehta — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 16:43:25 +0000

Perplexity could already fetch this data from the web and display results in a descriptive way, but the company is adding some visual flair to these results to make them more prominent and quick.

Android’s long-time VP of engineering Dave Burke is stepping down

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 04:56:27 +0000

Android is losing one of its long-time engineering leads. Dave Burke, VP of engineering at Android, said on Thursday that he is stepping down from the role after 14 years. However, he is not leaving Alphabet and will be exploring “AI/bio” projects within the company. Burke was involved in pivotal projects at Android, including the […]

TikTok comes for Google as it quietly rolls out image search capabilities in TikTok Shop

Aisha Malik — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:40:53 +0000

After leading the social media landscape, TikTok appears to be interested in challenging Google’s dominance in search. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the ability for users to take or upload a photo to find similar products in TikTok Shop. The feature, which was first spotted by X user Jonah Manzano, is available […]

Google’s June Pixel feature drop brings Gemini Nano AI model to Pixel 8 and 8a users

Ivan Mehta — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Google is finally making its Gemini Nano AI model available to Pixel 8 and 8a users after teasing it in March.

Apple confirms plans to work with Google’s Gemini ‘in the future’

Brian Heater — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 21:50:17 +0000

“We’re looking forward to doing integrations with other models, including Google Gemini, for instance, in the future," Federighi said during WWDC 2024.

Google Play cracks down on AI apps after circulation of apps for making deepfake nudes

Sarah Perez — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:19:30 +0000

Google says apps offering AI features will have to prevent the generation of restricted content.

Google partners with RapidSOS to enable 911 contact through RCS

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Google said today it is partnering with RapidSOS, a platform for emergency first responders, to enable users to contact 911 through RCS (Rich Messaging Service).

Google’s updated AI-powered NotebookLM expands to India, UK and over 200 other countries

Jagmeet Singh — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S. The platform, powered by Google’s multimodal LLM Gemini 1.5 Pro, has also been upgraded with new features and languages to help more people use AI to generate […]

Google’s new startup program focuses on bringing AI to public infrastructure

Sarah Perez — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:11:34 +0000

Google’s newest startup program, announced on Wednesday, aims to bring AI technology to the public sector. The newly launched “Google for Startups AI Academy: American Infrastructure” will offer participants hands-on training from AI experts and other support for companies solving problems in areas like agriculture, energy, education, public safety, healthcare, telecommunications, transportation, urban development, and […]

Tech giants form an industry group to help develop next-gen AI chip components

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 30 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Microsoft, Meta, Intel, AMD and others have formed a new group to design next-gen interconnects for AI accelerator hardware.

Google Chrome becomes a ‘picture-in-picture’ app

Sarah Perez — Wed, 29 May 2024 18:00:17 +0000

Instead of opening the user's actual browser or a WebView, Custom Tabs let users remain in their app while browsing.

Fitbit’s new kid smartwatch is a little Wiimote, a little Tamagotchi

Brian Heater — Wed, 29 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

The watch features a variety of different 3D games, unlocking more play time the more kids move.

Google adds AI-powered features to Chromebook

Ivan Mehta — Tue, 28 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Google said today it's adding new AI-powered features such as a writing assistant and a wallpaper creator and providing easy access to Gemini chatbot to its Chromebook Plus line of devices.

What are Google’s AI Overviews good for?

Anthony Ha — Sun, 26 May 2024 12:28:43 +0000

Google has been taking heat for some of the inaccurate, funny and downright weird answers that it’s been providing via AI Overviews in search. AI Overviews are the AI-generated search results that Google started rolling out more broadly earlier this month, with mixed results — apparently, a user looking for help in getting cheese to […]

Google invests $350M in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart

Manish Singh — Fri, 24 May 2024 11:57:38 +0000

Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. The Android maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as part of the deal, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup said in a brief statement Friday. The Google investment is part of a nearly $1 billion funding […]

Google to build first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting Africa with Australia

Paul Sawers — Thu, 23 May 2024 11:21:38 +0000

Google is preparing to build what will be the first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia. The news comes as the major cloud hyperscalers battle it out for business dollars, with Google playing catch-up with AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. Google’s announcement follows widespread outages across Africa, which have been attributed to […]