Google Developers Blog

How we’re helping developers with differential privacy

2021-01-28T06:00:00.002-08:00

Posted by Miguel Guevara, Product Manager, Privacy and Data Protection Office

At Google, we believe that innovation and privacy must go hand in hand. Earlier this month, we shared our work to keep people safe online, including our investments in leading privacy technologies such as differential privacy. Today, on Data Privacy Day, we want to share some updates on new ways we’re applying differential privacy technologies in our own products and making it more accessible to developers and businesses globally—providing them with greater access to data and insights while keeping people’s personal information private and secure.

Strengthening our core products with differential privacy

We first deployed our world-class differential privacy anonymization technology in Chrome nearly seven years ago and are continually expanding its use across our products including Google Maps and the Assistant. And as the world combats COVID-19, last year we published our COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, which uses differential privacy to help public health officials, economists and policymakers globally as they make critical decisions for their communities while ensuring no personally identifiable information is made available at any point.

This year in the Google Play console, we’ll provide new app metrics and benchmarks to developers in a differentially private manner. When launched, developers will be able to easily access metrics related to how successfully their apps are engaging their users, such as Daily Active Users and Revenue per Active user, in a manner that helps ensure individual users cannot be identified or re-identified. By adding differential privacy to these new app metrics, we’ll provide meaningful insights to help developers improve their apps without compromising people’s privacy, or developer confidentiality. Moving forward, we plan to expand the number of metrics we provide to developers using differential privacy.

As we have in the last year, we’ll continue to make our existing differential privacy library even easier for developers to use. For example, this month we’re open sourcing a new differentially private SQL database query language extension that is used in thousands of queries done every day at Google. These queries help our analysts obtain business insights, and observe product trends. This is a step forward in democratizing privacy safe data analysis, empowering data scientists around the world to uncover powerful insights while protecting and respecting the privacy of individuals.

Partnering with OpenMined to make differential privacy more widely accessible

As we continue to make advancements with privacy-preserving technologies in our own products, it’s also important to us that developers have access to this technology. That’s why in 2019, we open-sourced our differential privacy library and made it freely accessible, easy to deploy and useful to developers globally. Since then, hundreds of developers, researchers and institutions have incorporated Google’s differential privacy algorithms into their work, enabling them to tackle new problems while using data in a responsible and privacy protective way. One of these companies is French healthcare startup Arkhn. For Arkhn, differential privacy is making it possible to pursue its mission to revolutionize the healthcare industry with artificial intelligence, enabling them to gather, query and analyze cross-department hospital data in a secure, and safe way.

To help bring our world class differential privacy library to more developer teams, like the one at Arkhn, today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with OpenMined, a group of open-source developers that is focused on taking privacy preserving technologies and expanding their usage around the world. Together with OpenMined, we will develop a version of our differential privacy library specifically for python developers. By replicating Google’s differentially private infrastructure, Python developers will have access to a new and unique way to treat their data with world-class privacy.

A collaborative approach to improving the state of privacy in Machine Learning

Two years ago, we introduced TensorFlow Privacy (GitHub), an open source library that makes it easier not only for developers to train machine-learning models with privacy, but also for researchers to advance the state of the art in machine learning with strong privacy guarantees. In the past year, we've expanded the library to include support for TensorFlow 2, as well as both the Keras Model interface and TensorFlow's premade estimators. Thanks to a collaboration with researchers from University of Waterloo, we’ve improved performance, with our new release making it four times faster or more to train on common workloads.

We also recognize that training with privacy might be expensive, or not feasible. So we set out to understand how private machine learning models are. Last year we open-sourced our attack library to help address this and help anyone using the library get a broader privacy picture of their machine models. Since then, we partnered with researchers at Princeton University, and the National University of Singapore who have added new features that expand the library’s scope to test generative models and non-neural network models. Recently, researchers at Stanford Medical School tried it on some of their models, to test for memorization. This testing helped them understand the privacy behavior of their models, something that wasn’t possible beforehand.

We’ve also published new research studying the trade-offs between differential privacy and robustness, another property at the core of AI ethics, privacy and safety.

Our work continues as we invest in world-class-privacy that provides algorithmic protections to the people who use our products while nurturing and expanding a healthy open-source ecosystem. We strongly believe that everyone globally deserves world-class privacy, and we’ll continue partnering with organizations to fulfill that mission.

Join us for #30DaysOfFlutter

2021-01-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

Posted by Nikita Gandhi (Community Manager, GDG India), Nilay Yener (Program Manager, Flutter DevRel)

Happy New Year folks. It’s the perfect time of year to learn something new! Do you have an app idea you’ve been dreaming of over the holidays? If so, we have just the opportunity for you! Starting February 1st, leading up to our big event on March 3rd, join us for #30DaysOfFlutter to kickstart your learning journey and meet Flutter experts in the community. Whether you are building your first Flutter app or looking to improve your Flutter skills, we have curated content, code labs, and demos!

Flutter is Google’s open source UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It’s one of the fastest growing, most in-demand cross platform frameworks to learn and is used by freelance developers and large organizations around the world. Flutter uses the Dart language, so it will feel natural to many of you familiar with object-oriented languages.

Jump in, the water’s fine!

Along with the curated content, we will also have four live AskMeAnything sessions (#AMAs), where you can meet members of Google’s Flutter team and community. You can also join us on the FlutterDev Discord channel, where you can meet the other members of the community, ask and answer questions, and maybe make some new Flutter friends too!

Does this sound exciting? Visit the 30 Days of Flutter website to get more information and to register to join.

#30DaysOfFlutter Schedule

Your learning journey with Flutter for the month will look like this::

Week 1

Receive curated content to your inbox. Meet other Flutter Devs on Discord. Attend Kick Off Webinar on February 1st.

Week 2

Receive more content. Start building your first Flutter app. Join the webinar and ask your questions.

Week 3

Work on your app and attend the 3rd webinar to ask your questions.

Week 4

Complete your project and learn how to share it with the Flutter community.

Are you ready to learn one of the most in demand developer skills in the world?

21 websites and apps to make your 2021 better

2021-01-21T12:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by Christina Yeh, Google Registry Team

Google Registry is always on the lookout for interesting websites that have launched using our top-level domains. 2020 was a rough year, so to help you make 2021 (at least a little bit) better, we’ve rounded up 21 ways you can start something .new, get .appy, turn a new .page, and make .dev(elopment) a breeze.

Start something .new:

Collage.new: Looking for a new direction in 2021? Craft an inspiring vision board with BeFunky’s Collage Maker.
Resume.new: If you’re looking for a new job this year, spruce up your resume with one of CV2You’s customizable templates to open the door to new career adventures.
Hire.new: Hiring for new roles and jobs in 2021? With ZipRecruiter, you can post your job and reach quality candidates to join your team in no time.
Site.new: Have a website you’ve been meaning to build? With easy-to-use tools and professionally designed templates, you can launch your website using Google Sites.
Shopify.new: Starting a new side hustle? With Shopify’s powerful tools, anyone can quickly start a business and launch an online store.
Flutter.new: Been dreaming up a great idea for an app? Get it done in the new year with Flutter, Google’s toolkit for building beautiful applications for mobile, web and desktop.

Get .app(y):

Puppr.app: Do you have a new dog in your life? Get help training your furry friend with lessons, tricks, and live chat.
Uhmmm.app: Fight the awkward silence in your online meetings with free elevator music.
Sayana.app: Track your thoughts and feelings, get tips on coping with your emotions and talk to people in a similar life situation.
Glitterly.app: Make videos with animations, effects, stock videos and images in just a few clicks.
Get.reface.app: Say cheese! Use your selfies to make fun face swap videos and gifs.

Turn to the next .page:

Nxt.page: Recreate spontaneously meeting with friends and colleagues online, using this Chrome extension.
Funnies.page: Start your morning with some humor by getting five new comics from artists around the world, delivered daily to your inbox.
Web.page: Find design inspiration, trends and techniques for building websites.
Volition.page: Track your goals and progress any time, anywhere with this web app.
Byline.page: Interested in creative writing? Try this multiplayer app, where you build stories line by line, knowing only what the previous author wrote.

Make .dev(elopment) a breeze:

Projectjob.dev: Find and hire developers that are a perfect match for your requirements by exploring the work they’ve done before.
Htmldom.dev: Try this handy reference for manipulating web pages using Javascript.
Nodesign.dev: Use existing design tools to complete your development project.
Practice.dev: If practice makes perfect, you can improve your skills by solving real web development challenges and learn by doing.
Daily.dev: Get the latest developer news from tech blogs on any topic you can think of, all in one place.

Happy New Year from all of us at Google Registry! We hope these websites and apps help you get the most out of 2021.

Community leaders upskill themselves and find new roles with Elevate by Google Developers

2021-01-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

Posted by Kübra Zengin, GDG North America Regional Lead

Image of participants in a recent Elevate workshop.

The North America Developer Ecosystem team recently hosted Elevate for Google Developer Groups organizers and Women Techmakers Ambassadors in US & Canada. The three-month professional development program met every Wednesday via Google Meet to help tech professionals upskill themselves with workshops on leadership, communication, thinking, and teamwork.

The first cohort of the seminar-style program recently came to a close, with 40+ Google Developer Groups organizers and Women Techmakers Ambassadors participating. Additionally, 18 guest speakers - 89% of whom were underrepresented genders - hosted specialized learning sessions over three months of events.

Elevate is just one example of the specialized applied skills training available to the Google Developer Groups community. As we look ahead to offering Elevate again in 2021, we wanted to share with you some of the key takeaways from the first installment of the program.

What the graduates had to say

From landing new roles at companies like Twitter and Accenture, to negotiating salary raises, the 40 graduates of Elevate have seen many successes. Here’s what a few of them had to say:

“I got a role at Accenture as a software engineer because I used the learnings from Elevate when applying and interviewing for the job. I can't thank the Google team enough!”

“The interactive workshops truly helped me land my new job at Twitter.”

“After the Elevate trainings on negotiation, I successfully secured a higher salary with my new employer.”

Whether it’s finding new jobs or moving to new countries, Elevate’s graduates have used their new skills to guide their careers towards their passions. Check out a few of the program’s key lessons below:

Bringing your best self to the table

One major focus of the program was to help community leaders develop their own professional identity and confidence by learning communication techniques that would help them stand out and define themselves in the workplace.

Entire learning sessions were dedicated to specific value-adding topics, including:

How to use persuasive body language;
Finding a networking, presenting, and storytelling voice;
The best practices for salary negotiation.

Along with other sessions on growth mindsets, problem solving, and more, attendees gained a deeper understanding of the best ways to present themselves, their ideas, and their worth in a professional setting - an essential ability that many feel has already helped them navigate job markets with more precision.

A team that feels valued brings value

“Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.”

The advice above, offered by a guest speaker during a teambuilding session, was one of the quotes that resonated with participants the most during the program. The emphasis on how coworkers think of each other and the best ways to build a culture of ownership over a team’s wins and losses embodies the key learnings central to Elevate’s mission.

The program further emphasized this message with learning sessions on:

Giving and accepting clear feedback;
Bias busting and empathy training in the workplace;
Conflict management and resolution.

With these trainings, paired with others on growth mindsets and decision making, Elevate’s participants were able to start analyzing the effectiveness of different work environments on productivity. Through breakout sessions, they quickly realized that the more secure and supported an employee feels, the more willing they are to go the extra mile for their team. Equipped with this new knowledge base, many participants have already started bringing these key takeaways to their own workplaces in an effort to build more inclusive and productive cultures.

Whether it’s finding a new role or improving your applied skills, we can’t wait to see how Google Developer programs can help members achieve their professional goals.

For similar opportunities, find out how to join a Google Developer Group near you, here. And register for upcoming applied skills trainings on the Elevate website, here.

Solve for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals with Google technologies in this year’s Solution Challenge.

2021-01-12T09:01:00.006-08:00

Posted by Erica Hanson, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs

Created by the United Nations in 2015 to be achieved by 2030, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by all 193 United Nations Member States aim to end poverty, ensure prosperity, and protect the planet.

Last year brought many challenges, but it also brought a greater spirit around helping each other and giving back to our communities. With that in mind, we invite students around the world to join the Google Developer Student Clubs 2021 Solution Challenge!

If you’re new to the Solution Challenge, it is an annual competition that invites university students to develop solutions for real world problems using one or more Google products or platforms.

This year, see how you can use Android, TensorFlow, Google Cloud, Flutter, or any of your favorite Google technologies to promote employment for all, economic growth, and climate action, by building a solution for one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

What winners of the Solution Challenge receive

Participants will receive specialized prizes at different stages:

The Top 50 teams will receive mentorship from Google and other experts to further work on their projects.
The Top 10 finalists will receive a 1-year subscription to Pluralsight, swag, additional customized mentoring from Google, and a feature in the Google Developers Blog and Demo Day live on YouTube.
The 3 Grand Prize Winners will receive all the prizes included in the Top 10 category along with a Chromebook and a private team meeting with a Google executive.

How to get started on the Solution Challenge

There are four main steps to joining the Solution Challenge and getting started on your project:

Register at goo.gle/solutionchallenge and join a Google Developer Student Club at your college or university. If there is no club at your university, you can join the closest one through the event platform.
Select one or more of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals to solve for.
Build a solution using Google technology.
Create a demo and submit your project by March 31, 2021.

Resources from Google for Solution Challenge participants

Google will provide Solution Challenge participants with various resources to help students build strong projects for their contest submission.

Live online sessions with Q&As
Mentorship from Google, Google Developer Experts, and the Developer Student Club community
Curated codelabs designed by Google Developers
Access to Design Sprint guidelines developed by Google Ventures
and more!

When are winners announced?

Once all the projects are submitted after the March 31st deadline, judges will evaluate and score each submission from around the world using the criteria listed on the website. From there, winning solutions will be announced in three rounds.

Round 1 (May): The Top 50 teams will be announced.

Round 2 (July): After the top 50 teams submit their new and improved solutions, 10 finalists will be announced.

Round 3 (August): In the finale, the top 3 grand prize winners will be announced live on YouTube during the 2021 Solution Challenge Demo Day.

With a passion for building a better world, savvy coding skills, and a little help from Google technology, we can’t wait to see the solutions students create.

Learn more and sign up for the 2021 Solution Challenge, here.

Announcing New Smart Home App Discovery Features

2021-01-07T12:30:00.004-08:00

Posted by Toni Klopfenstein, Developer Advocate

When a user connects a smart device to the Google Assistant via the Home app, the user must select the appropriate related Action from the list of all available Actions. The user then clicks through multiple screens to complete their device setup. Today, we're releasing two new features to improve this device discovery process and drive customer adoption of your Smart Home Action through the Google Home app. App Discovery and Deep Linking are two convenience features that help users find your Google-Assistant compatible smart devices quickly and onboard faster.

App Discovery enables users to quickly find your smart home Action thanks to suggestion chips within the Google Home app. You can implement this new feature through the Actions Console by creating a verified brand link between your Action, your website, and your mobile app. App Discovery doesn't require any coding work to implement, making this a development-light feature that provides great improvements to the user experience of device linking.

In addition to helping users discover your Action directly through suggestion chips, Deep Linking enables you to guide users to your account linking flow within the Google Home app in one step. These deep links are easily added to your mobile app or web content, guiding users to your smart home integration with a single tap.

Deep Linking and App Discovery can help you create a more streamlined onboarding experience for your users, driving increased engagement and user satisfaction, and can be implemented with minimal engineering work.

To implement App Discovery and Deep Linking for your Smart Home Action, check out the developer documents, or watch the video covering these new features.

You can also check out the smart home codelabs if you are just starting to build out your Action.

We want to hear from you, so continue sharing your feedback with us through the issue tracker, and engage with other smart home developers in the /r/GoogleAssistantDev community. Follow @ActionsOnGoogle on Twitter for more of our team's updates, and tweet using #AoGDevs to share what you’re working on. We can’t wait to see what you build!

A Google for Startups Accelerator for startups using voice technology to better the world

2020-12-17T09:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by Jason Scott, Head of Startup Developer Ecosystem, U.S., Google

At Google, we have long understood that voice user interfaces can help millions of people accomplish their goals more effectively. Our journey in voice began in 2008 with Voice Search -- with notable milestones since, such as building our first deep neural network in 2012, our first sequence-to-sequence network in 2015, launching Google Assistant in 2016, and processing speech fully on device in 2019. These building blocks have enabled the unique voice experiences across Google products that our users rely on everyday.

Voice AI startups play a key role in helping build and deliver innovative voice-enabled experiences to users. And, Google is committed to helping tech startups deliver high impact solutions in the voice space. This month, we are excited to announce the Google for Startups Accelerator: Voice AI program, which will bring together the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology with a joint mission to advance and support the most promising voice-enabled AI startups across North America.

As part of this Google for Startups Accelerator, selected startups will be paired with experts to help tackle the top technical challenges facing their startup. With an emphasis on product development and machine learning, founders will connect with voice technology and AI/ML experts from across Google to take their innovative solutions to the next level.

We are proud to launch our first ever Google for Startups Accelerator: Voice AI -- building upon Google’s longstanding efforts to advance the future of voice-based computing. The accelerator will kick off in March 2021, bringing together a cohort of 10 to 12 innovative voice technology startups. If this sounds like your startup, we'd love to hear from you. Applications are open until January 28, 2021.

Announcing gRPC Kotlin 1.0 for Android and Cloud

2020-12-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

Posted by Louis Wasserman, Software Engineer and James Ward, Developer Advocate

Kotlin is now the fourth "most loved" programming language with millions of developers using it for Android, server-side / cloud backends, and various other target runtimes. At Google, we've been building more of our apps and backends with Kotlin to take advantage of its expressiveness, safety, and excellent support for writing asynchronous code with coroutines.

Since everything in Google runs on top of gRPC, we needed an idiomatic way to do gRPC with Kotlin. Back in April 2020 we announced the open sourcing of gRPC Kotlin, something we'd originally built for ourselves. Since then we've seen over 30,000 downloads and usage in Android and Cloud. The community and our engineers have been working hard polishing docs, squashing bugs, and making improvements to the project; culminating in the shiny new 1.0 release! Dive right in with the gRPC Kotlin Quickstart!

For those new to gRPC & Kotlin let's do a quick runthrough of some of the awesomeness. gRPC builds on Protocol Buffers, aka "protos" (language agnostic & high performance data interchange) and adds the network protocol for efficiently communicating with protos. From a proto definition the servers, clients, and data transfer objects can all be generated. Here is a simple gRPC proto:

message HelloRequest {
  string name = 1;
}

message HelloReply {
  string message = 1;
}

service Greeter {
  rpc SayHello (HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply) {}
}

In a Kotlin project you can then define the implementation of the Greeter's SayHello service with something like:

object : GreeterGrpcKt.GreeterCoroutineImplBase() {
    override suspend fun sayHello(request: HelloRequest) =
        HelloReply
            .newBuilder()
            .setMessage("hello, ${request.name}")
            .build()
}

You'll notice that the function has `suspend` on it because it uses Kotlin's coroutines, a built-in way to handle async / reactive IO. Check out the server example project.

With gRPC the client "stubs" are generated making it easy to connect to gRPC services. For the protoc above, the client stub can be used in Kotlin with:

val stub = GreeterCoroutineStub(channel)
val request = HelloRequest.newBuilder().setName("world").build()
val response = stub.sayHello(request)
println("Received: ${response.message}")

In this example the `sayHello` method is also a `suspend` function utilizing Kotlin coroutines to make the reactive IO easier. Check out the client example project.

Kotlin also has an API for doing reactive IO on streams (as opposed to requests), called Flow. gRPC Kotlin generates client and server stubs using the Flow API for stream inputs and outputs. The proto can define a service with unary streaming or bidirectional streaming, like:

service Greeter {
  rpc SayHello (stream HelloRequest) returns (stream HelloReply) {}
}

In this example, the server's `sayHello` can be implemented with Flows:

object : GreeterGrpcKt.GreeterCoroutineImplBase() {
  override fun sayHello(requests: Flow<HelloRequest>): Flow<HelloReply> {
    return requests.map { request ->
      println(request)
      HelloReply.newBuilder().setMessage("hello, ${request.name}").build()
    }
  }
}

This example just transforms each `HelloRequest` item on the flow to an item in the output / `HelloReply` Flow.

The bidirectional stream client is similar to the coroutine one but instead it passes a Flow to the `sayHello` stub method and then operates on the returned Flow:

val stub = GreeterCoroutineStub(channel)
val helloFlow = flow {
  while(true) {
    delay(1000)
    emit(HelloRequest.newBuilder().setName("world").build())
  }
}

stub.sayHello(helloFlow).collect { helloResponse ->
  println(helloResponse.message)
}

In this example the client sends a `HelloRequest` to the server via Flow, once per second. When the client gets items on the output Flow, it just prints them. Check out the bidi-streaming example project.

As you've seen, creating data transfer objects and services around them is made elegant and easy with gRPC Kotlin. But there are a few other exciting things we can do with this...

Android Clients

Protobuf compilers can have a "lite" mode which generates smaller, higher performance classes which are more suitable for Android. Since gRPC Kotlin uses gRPC Java it inherits the benefits of gRPC Java's lite mode. The generated code works great on Android and there is a `grpc-kotlin-stub-lite` artifact which depends on the associated `grpc-protobuf-lite`. Using the generated Kotlin stub client is just like on the JVM. Check out the stub-android example and android example.

GraalVM Native Image Clients

The gRPC lite mode is also a great fit for GraalVM Native Image which turns JVM-based applications into ahead-of-time compiled native images, i.e. they run without a JVM. These applications can be smaller, use less memory, and start much faster so they are a good fit for auto-scaling and Command Line Interface environments. Check out the native-client example project which produces a nice & small 14MB executable client app (no JVM needed) and starts, connects to the server, makes a request, handles the response, and exits in under 1/100th of a second using only 18MB of memory.

Google Cloud Ready

Backend services created with gRPC Kotlin can easily be packaged for deployment in Kubernetes, Cloud Run, or really anywhere you can run docker containers or JVM apps. Cloud Run is a cloud service that runs docker containers and scales automatically based on demand so you only pay when your service is handling requests. If you'd like to give a gRPC Kotlin service a try on Cloud Run:

Deploy the app with a few clicks

In Cloud Shell, run the client to connect to your app on the cloud:

export PROJECT_ID=PUT_YOUR_PROJECT_ID_HERE
docker run -it gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/grpc-hello-world-mvn \
"java -cp target/classes:target/dependency/* io.grpc.examples.helloworld.HelloWorldClientKt YOUR_CLOUD_RUN_DOMAIN_NAME"

Here is a video of what that looks like:

Check out more Cloud Run gRPC Kotlin examples

Thank You!

We are super excited to have reached 1.0 for gRPC Kotlin and are incredibly grateful to everyone who filed bugs, sent pull requests, and gave the pre-releases a try! There is still more to do, so if you want to help or follow along, check out the project on GitHub.

Also huge shoutouts to Brent Shaffer, Patrice Chalin, David Winer, Ray Tsang, Tyson Henning, and Kevin Bierhoff for all their contributions to this release!

2020 Google Assistant developer Year in Review

2020-12-16T09:13:00.011-08:00

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Director, Product Management Google Assistant

With 2020 coming to a close, we wanted to reflect on everything we have launched this year to help you, our developers and partners, create powerful voice experiences with Google Assistant.

Today, many top brands and developers turn to Google Assistant to help users get things done on their phones and on Smart Displays. Over the last year, the number of Actions built by third-party developers has more than doubled. Below is a snapshot of some of our partners who’ve integrated with Google Assistant:

2020 Highlights

Below are a few highlights of what we have launched in 2020:

1. Integrate your Android mobile Apps with Google Assistant

App Actions allow your users to jump right into existing functionality in your Android app with the help of Google Assistant. It makes it easier for users to find what they're looking for in your app in a natural way by using their voice. We take care of all the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) processing, making it easy to develop in only a few days. In 2020, we announced that App Actions are now available for all Android developers to voicify their apps and integrate with Google Assistant.

For common tasks such as opening your apps, opening specific pages in your apps or searching within apps, we introduced Common Intents. For a deeper integration, we’ve expanded our vertical-specific built-in intents (BIIs), to cover more than 60 intents across 10 verticals, adding new categories like Social, Games, Travel & Local, Productivity, Shopping and Communications.

For cases where there isn't a built-in intent for your app functionality, you can instead create custom intents that are unique to your Android app. Like BIIs, custom intents follow the actions.xml schema and act as connection points between Assistant and your defined fulfillments.

Learn more about how to integrate your app with Google Assistant here.

2. Create new experiences for Smart Displays

We also announced new developer tools to help you build high quality, engaging experiences to reach users at home by building for Smart Displays.

Actions Builder is a new web-based IDE that provides a graphical interface to show the entire conversation flow. It allows you to manage Natural Language Understanding (NLU) training data and provides advanced debugging tools. And, it is fully integrated into the Actions Console so you can now build, debug, test, release, and analyze your Actions - all in one place.

Actions SDK, a file based representation of your Action and the ability to use a local IDE. The SDK not only enables local authoring of NLU and conversation schemas, but it also allows bulk import and export of training data to improve conversation quality. The Actions SDK is accompanied by a command line interface, so you can build and manage an Action fully in code using your favorite source control and continuous integration tools.

Interactive Canvas allows you to add visual, immersive experiences to Conversational Actions. We announced the expansion of Interactive Canvas to support Storytelling and Education verticals earlier this year.

Continuous Match Mode allows the Assistant to respond immediately to a user’s speech for more fluid experiences by recognizing defined words and phrases set by you.

We also created a central hub for you to find resources to build games on Smart Displays. This site is filled with a game design playbook, interviews with game creators, code samples, tools access, and everything you need to create awesome games for smart displays.

Actions API provides a new programmatic way to test your critical user journeys more thoroughly and effectively, to help you ensure your Action's conversations run smoothly.

The Dialogflow migration tool inside the Actions Console automates much of the work to move projects to the new and improved Actions Builder tool.

We also worked with partners such as Voiceflow and Jovo, to launch integrations to support voice application development on the Assistant. This effort is part of our commitment to enable you to leverage your favorite development tools, while building for Google Assistant.

We launched several other new features that help you build high quality experiences for the home, such as Media APIs, new and improved voices (available in Actions Console), home storage API.

Get started building for Smart Displays here.

3. Discovery features

Once you build high quality Actions, you are ready for your users to discover them. We have designed new touch points to help your users easily learn about your Actions..

For example, on Android mobile, we’ll be recommending relevant Apps Actions even when the user doesn't mention the app’s name explicitly by showing suggestions. Google Assistant will also be suggesting apps proactively, depending on individual app usage patterns. Android mobile users will also be able to customize their experience, creating their own way to automate their most common tasks with app shortcuts, enabling people to set up quick phrases to enable app functions they frequently use. By simply saying "Hey Google, shortcuts", they can set up and explore suggested shortcuts in the settings screen. We’ll also make proactive suggestions for shortcuts throughout Google Assistants’ mobile experience, tailored to how you use your phone.

Assistant Links deep link to your conversational Action to deliver rich Google Assistant experiences to your websites, so you can send your users directly to your conversational Actions from anywhere on the web.

We also recently opened two new built-in intents (BIIs) for public registration: Education and Storytelling. Registering your Actions for these intents allows your users to discover them in a simple, natural way through general requests to Google Assistant on Smart Displays. People will then be able to say "Hey Google, teach me something new" and they will be presented with a browsable selection of different education experiences. For stories, users can simply say "Hey Google, tell me a story".

We know you build personalized and premium experience for your users, and need to make it easy for them to connect their accounts to your Actions. To help streamline this process we opened two betas for improved account linking flows that will allow simple, streamlined authentication via apps.

Link with Google enables anyone with an Android or iOS app where they are already logged in to complete the linking flow with just a few clicks, without needing to re-enter credentials.
App Flip helps you build a better mobile account linking experience, so your users can seamlessly link their accounts to Google without having to re-enter their credentials.

What to expect in 2021

Looking ahead, we will double down on enabling you, our developers and partners to build great experiences for GoogleAssistant and help you reach your users on the go and at home. You can expect to hear more from us on how we are improving the Google Assistant experience to make it easy for Android developers to integrate their Android app with Google Assistant and also help developers achieve success through discovery and monetization.

We are excited to see what you will build with these new features and tools. Thank you for being a part of the Google Assistant ecosystem. We can’t wait to launch even more features and tools for Android developers and Smart Display experiences in 2021.

Want to stay in the know with announcements from the Google Assistant team? Sign up for our monthly developer newsletter here.

Meet the Google Workspace Developer Experts

2020-12-14T10:31:00.002-08:00

Posted by Charles Maxson, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud

Superheroes are well known for wearing capes, fighting villains and looking to save the world from evil. There also are superheroes that quietly choose to use their super powers to explain technology to new users, maintain community forums, write blog posts, speak at events, host video series, create demos, share sample code and more. All in the name of helping other developers become more successful by learning new skills, delivering better apps, and ultimately enhancing their careers. At Google, we refer to the latter category of superheroes as Google Developer Experts or “GDEs” for short.

The Google Developer Experts program is a global network of deeply experienced technology experts, thought leaders and influencers who actively support developer communities around the world, sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm for a wide range of topic areas from Android to Angular to Google Assistant to Google Cloud – and of course, Google Workspace. Mindful that all GDEs are volunteers who not only give their time freely to support others, they also help improve our products by offering their insightful feedback, heavily testing new features often before they are released, all the while helping expand both use cases and audiences along the way.

With the Google Workspace GDE community including members from more than a dozen countries around the world, we wanted to ask Google Workspace Developer experts what excites them about building on Google Workspace, and why they do what they do as our superheroes helping others become better Google Workspace developers. Here’s what a few of these experts had to say:

Google Workspace GDEs spanning the globe

“Workspace has allowed me to create innovative solutions for teacher workflows that save them significant time and/or allow teachers to use workspace more effectively with their students.”
- Alice Keeler (@alicekeeler), Kansas, US

“There's no learning curve for users and it's hard to think of a problem you cannot solve with Google Apps Script.”
- Amit Agarwal (@labnol), India

“The accessibility and ubiquity of Google Workspace, and more specifically customization with Apps Script, has kept me working (and in work!) as a freelance Apps Script developer since 2013!”
- Andrew Roberts (@andrewroberts6), Llanwrda, Wales, UK

“There are two things I love about Google Workspace. First, everything is in the cloud, so it's accessible anywhere and easily shared. And second, the integrations between different Workspace tools and third-party tools are super easy to work with. My data can move automatically between different applications and save me from tedious manual workflows.”
- Ben Collins (@benlcollins), East Coast, US

“Workspace allows anyone with an idea to create impactful solutions to solving problems, and I love showing beginners with little or no coding experience that they are empowered to build digital solutions!”
- Cleo Espiritu (@cinfourthirds), Canada

“I love Google Workspace due to Google Apps Script. It has been a 100% serverless platform since 2009 for automation, extension and integration. I have developed many personal and work applications.”
- Ivan Kutil (@ivankutil), Prague, Czech Republis

“With Add-Ons and Apps Script, Google Workspace goes above and beyond in enabling a customized experience across the most common professional tools - and makes them accessible regardless of the device I'm using.”
- Jeremy Glassenberg (@jglassenberg), San Francisco, CA

“With Google Workspace we can all become both smarter and more productive. The joy of developing in Google Workspace is often powerful solutions can be a couple lines of code, and increasingly no code at all.”
- Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey), Scotland, UK

“I use Workspace for the ability to break through the ceiling with Apps Script when there is something I can't do in Sheets, Forms, Docs & Slides alone”
- Max Brawer (@brawermd), New York, NY

"To be able to build solutions that boost collaboration is what I like the most. The open structure allows you to add your custom needs. A simple and intuitive interface; no need for switching, just start building!"
- Niek Waarbroek (niekwaarbroek), Netherlands

“Apps Script is the "glue" that pastes together many Google services to bring on beautiful automations to your personal, business or school data workflows. Anytime, anywhere, all in the cloud. Its immediacy and ease of use make it my first choice to leverage the full potential of Google Workspace.”
- Pablo Felip Monferrer (@pfelipm), Castelló de la Plana, Spain

“I've always been good with Spreadsheet formulas but even as someone who doesn't necessarily come with a strong coding/technical background, Workspace tools made it so much more easier & seamless to connect one another and build stuff the way any product/engineering team would. This inspired me to connect different SaaS tools that have APIs and build my own set of integrations.”
- Sourabh Choraria (@schoraria911), Bangalore, India

“I'm using Workspace as it is the only solution for the last 10 years that allows me to access my documents from anywhere and provides me an easy to use development interface for Google API with Apps Script.”
- Stéphane Giron (@st3phcloud), Lyon, France

“I use Google Workspace for its great collaboration, communications, integrations, and workflows. I recently led our team to build a client solution for a COVID-19 scrolling ticker in Gmail that leveraged Sheets, Apps Script, Firebase Notifications and Chrome extensions -- anything is possible!”
- Steve Webster (@SteveWebster22), Lakeland, FL

“Workspace can reduce the process costs in the various works by the automatic control of applications. Especially, when Google Apps Script and APIs are used, the possibility of higher efficiency will be the infinity. I believe that this will blow a new wind towards our daily life.”
- Kanshi Tanaike (@tanaikech), Osaka, Japan

“Because we can automate our work with Apps Script.”

- Yuki Tanabe (@tanabee_en), Tokyo, Japan

Google Workspace Developer GDE resources

If you are interested in connecting and learning more about what GDEs are talking about or working on, follow with them via their social channels. Most GDEs are quite active in sharing everything from daily tips, events, or fully open source projects. Use the links above in the GDE profiles or reference the full GDE directory to explore experts across all Google developer technologies.

The Google Workspace GDE community also host some really useful resources worth calling out here:

Community Forums
- Google Groups - groups.google.com/g/google-apps-script-community
- Stack Overflow - stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-apps-script
- Slack - google-apps-script.slack.com
Lists
- On Twitter - twitter.com/i/lists/1235144368593367043
- Medium Google GDE Blogs - medium.com/google-developer-experts
GDE News & Tutorial Sites
- Apps Script Pulse (News) - pulse.appsscript.info
- Digital Inspiration (Add-ons & How-To’s) - digitalinspiration.com
- Google Sheets Essentials (Automation How-To’s) - benlcollins.com
- Desktop Liberation (Apps Script Tutorials) - ramblings.mcpher.com
- Teacher Tech (Resources for EDU) - alicekeeler.com
- Totally Unscripted (Community Show) - sites.google.com/corp/view/totallyunscripted/home
GDE Video
- Totally Unscripted - www.youtube.com/c/TotallyUnscriptedShow

Announcing the Newest Addition to MLKit: Entity Extraction

2020-12-11T10:56:00.002-08:00

Posted by Kenny Sulaimon, Product Manager, ML Kit, Tory Voight, Product Manager, ML Kit, Daniel Furlong, Lei Yu, Software Engineers, ML Kit, Dong Chen, Technical Lead, MLKit

Six months ago, we introduced the standalone version of the ML Kit SDK, making it even easier to integrate on-device machine learning into mobile apps. Since then, we’ve launched the Digital Ink Recognition and Pose Detection APIs, and also introduced the ML Kit early access program. Today we are excited to add Entity Extraction to the official ML Kit lineup and also debut a new API for our early access program, Selfie Segmentation!

With ML Kit’s Entity Extraction API, you can now improve the user experience inside your app by understanding text and performing specific actions on it.

The Entity Extraction API allows you to detect and locate entities from raw text, and take action based on those entities. The API works on static text and also in real-time while a user is typing. It supports 11 different entities and 15 different languages (with more coming in the future) to allow developers to make any text interaction a richer experience for the user.

Supported Entities

Address (350 third street, cambridge)
Date-Time* (12/12/2020, tomorrow at 3pm) (let's meet tomorrow at 6pm)
Email (entity-extraction@google.com)
Flight Number* (LX37)
IBAN* (CH52 0483 0000 0000 0000 9)
ISBN* (978-1101904190)
Money (including currency)* ($12, 25USD)
Payment Card* (4111 1111 1111 1111)
Phone Number ((555) 225-3556, 12345)
Tracking Number* (1Z204E380338943508)
URL (www.google.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus, seznam.cz)

Example Results

Real World Applications

(Images courtesy of TamTam)

Our early access partner, TamTam, has been using the Entity Extraction API to provide helpful suggestions to their users during their chat conversations. This feature allows users to quickly perform actions based on the context of their conversations.

While integrating this API, Iurii Dorofeev, Head of TamTam Android Development, mentioned, “We appreciated the ease of integration of the ML Kit ... and it works offline. Clustering the content of messages right on the device allowed us to save resources. ML Kit capabilities will help us develop other features for TamTam messenger in the future.”

Check out their messaging app on the Google Play and App Store today.

Under The Hood

(Diagram of underlying Text Classifier API)

ML Kit’s Entity Extraction API builds upon the technology powering the Smart Linkify feature in Android 10+ to deliver an easy-to-use and streamlined experience for developers. For an in-depth review of the Text Classifier API, please see our blog post here.

The neural network annotators/models in the Entity Extraction API work as follows: A given input text is first split into words (based on space separation), then all possible word subsequences of certain maximum length (15 words in the example above) are generated, and for each candidate the scoring neural net assigns a value (between 0 and 1) based on whether it represents a valid entity.

Next, the generated entities that overlap are removed, favoring the ones with a higher score over the conflicting ones with a lower score. Then a second neural network is used to classify the type of the entity as a phone number, an address, or in some cases, a non-entity.

The neural network models in the Entity Extraction API are used in combination with other types of models (e.g. rule-based) to identify additional entities in text, such as: flight numbers, currencies and other examples listed above. Therefore, if multiple entities are detected for one text input, the Entity Extraction API can return several overlapping results.

Lastly, ML Kit will automatically download the required language-specific models to the device dynamically. You can also explicitly manage models you want available on the device by using ML Kit’s model management API. This can be useful if you want to download models ahead of time for your users. The API also allows you to delete models that are no longer required.

New APIs Coming Soon

Selfie Segmentation

With the increased usage of selfie cameras and webcams in today's world, being able to quickly and easily add effects to camera experiences has become a necessity for many app developers today.

ML Kit's Selfie Segmentation API allows developers to easily separate the background from a scene and focus on what matters. Adding cool effects to selfies or inserting your users into interesting background environments has never been easier. This API produces great results with low latency on both Android and iOS devices.

(Example of ML Kit Selfie Segmentation)

Key capabilities:

Easily allows developers to replace or blur a user’s background
Works well with single or multiple people
Cross-platform support (iOS and Android)
Runs real-time on most modern phones

To join our early access program and request access to ML Kit's Selfie Segmentation API, please fill out this form.

Get ready to up your Apps Script!

2020-12-09T09:00:00.001-08:00

Posted by Charles Maxson, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud

It’s been a little over a decade since Apps Script was introduced as the development platform to automate and extend Google Workspace. Since its inception, tens of millions of solution builders ranging from professional developers, business users, and hobbyists have adopted Apps Script because of its tight integration with Google Workspace, coupled with its relative ease of use, makes building solutions fast and accessible.

Over the course of its history, Apps Script has constantly evolved to keep up with the ever-changing Google Workspace applications themselves, as new features are introduced and existing ones enhanced. Changes to the platform and the development environment itself have been more deliberate, allowing the wide-ranging Apps Script developer audience to rely on a predictable and proven development experience.

Recently, there have been some notable updates. Earlier this year the Apps Script runtime engine went through a major update from the original Rhino runtime to the new V8 version, allowing you to leverage modern JavaScript features in your Apps Script projects. Another milestone launch was the introduction of the Apps Script Dashboard, the ‘homepage’ of Apps Script, where you have access to all your projects and Apps Script platform settings by simply navigating to script.google.com.

But as far as the overall developer experience with Apps Script, the core components of the Apps Script IDE (Integrated Development Environment) where developers spend most of their time writing and debugging code, managing versions and exceptions, deploying projects, etc.; that has been relatively unchanged over App Script’s long storied history—that is until now—and as an Apps Script developer, you are about to get more productive!

Welcome to the new Apps Script IDE

The new Apps Script IDE features the same rich integration with Google Workspace as it did before, allowing you to get started building solutions without having to install or configure anything. If you are working on a standalone script project application, you can use the Apps Script Dashboard to launch your project directly, or if you are working on a container bound project in Sheets, Slides or Docs, you can do so from selecting Tools > Script editor from their top menus.

Apps Script Project Dashboard

If you launch your project using the Apps Script Dashboard, you will still start off in the Project Details Overview page. The contents of the Project Details page are relatively unchanged with just a few cosmetic updates where you can still get project info on the numbers of executions and users for your projects, errors, and OAuth scopes in use. On closer inspection, however, the seemingly subtle change to the left hand navigation is actually the first big enhancement of the new Apps Script IDE. Previously, when you launched into a project, you still had the Application Dashboard menus which let you navigate your projects, view all your executions and triggers as well as Apps Script features.

Apps Script Project Details Overview

With the new IDE experience, the prior Apps Script Dashboard menu gives way to a new project-specific menu that lets you focus on your active project. This offers developers a more unified experience of moving between project settings and the code editor without having to navigate menus or bounce back to the applications dashboard. So while it's a subtle change at first glance, it's actually a significant boost for productivity.

If you launch the new IDE as a container bound project, you will immediately enter into the new Apps Script code editor, but the new project menu and developer flow is identical.

A Modern, Material Design

One of the more striking updates of the new Apps Script IDE was the work done on the code editor to modernize its look and feel, while also unifying the design with the overall developer experience. More than just aesthetic changes, the new code editor was designed to help developers focus on the most common essential tasks. This includes moving away from the traditional menu elements across the top of the original code editor, to a streamlined set of commands that focus on developer productivity. For example, the new code editor offers a simplified menu system optimized for running and debugging code, while all the other ‘project-related’ functions have been reorganized outside the code editor to the left-hand project navigation bar. This will simplify and set the focus on the core task of writing code, which will assist both new and seasoned Apps Script developers.

Apps Script Code Editor

Boosting Developer Productivity

Behind the fresh new look of the Apps Script code editor, there is a long list of new productivity enhancements that will make any Apps Script developer happy. Some are subtle, some are major. Many are simply delightful. Any combination of them will make you more productive in writing Apps Script code. Here are just some of the highlights:

Code Editor enhancements - The actual code editor itself has been updated to make the code writing (and reading) experience better. AutoComplete helps you produce error free code easier than before with intelligent features like adding parentheses and apostrophes automatically as you code. Visual Indicators help you quickly see where issues lie as you navigate within your project. Inline documentation provides interactive definitions of Apps Script objects and methods right at the source while you are editing. Function Folding lets you collapse and expand code blocks to focus on what you are working on, while allowing you to hide what isn’t currently in scope. AutoFormating instantly makes your code consistently readable, which is a great boost for team development projects too.

Code Editor Enhancements

Context Menu - The new code editor now includes a contextual menu accessed with a simple right-click. This context menu will be every developer's companion as it hosts some practical functionality like copy and paste, but also introduces some new powerhouse productivity features like locating variables, renaming symbols and reformatting your code document, and more.

Context Menu Image

Command Palette - While the new IDE’s UI focuses on simplicity, the command palette unlocks an unimaginable collection of features that does nearly anything a developer could want to do. The command palette is easily accessed by pressing {F1} from within the code editor.

Commend Palette Menu Image

Debugger - The debugging experience has been improved to allow developers to examine their code easier. Setting breakpoints works similarly but offers better visual queues. The new design of the debugger tools makes it cleaner and clearer with a dedicated UI optimization debugging steps and viewing the call stack and watch variables. This enhancement should help new developers get their bearings on debugging easier, while seasoned developers will appreciate the simplified, decluttered approach.

Debugger Image

Real-time Logs - Managing the executions (and occasional errors) of your projects get even easier with Real-time Logs, which display log results directly in the editor as they are invoked, offering a real time saving convenience to developer productivity.

Logging Image

Write your best code

The best way to explore all that awaits is you in the new Apps Script IDE and code editor is by simply diving in and writing some code by visiting script.new. Then you will truly see how the new code editor really does help you be more productive, enabling you to better write code faster, with less errors and with greater readability. The previous version of the Apps Script IDE and code editor served us well, but the jump in productivity and an overall better developer experience awaits you with the new Apps Script IDE.

Go write your best code starting at: script.google.com

To learn more: developers.google.com/apps-script

Celebrate #CSEdWeek with Google Developers!

2020-12-07T09:00:00.144-08:00

Posted by Google Developer Studio

Computer Science Education Week kicks off on Monday, December 7th and runs through the 13th. This annual call-to-action was started in 2009 by the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to raise awareness about the need to encourage CS education at all levels and to highlight the importance of computing across industries.

Google Developers strives to make learning Google technology accessible to all and works to empower developers to build good things together.

Whether you’re a student or a teacher, check out our collection of introductory resources and demos below. Learn how you can get started in your developer journey or empower others to get started.

Note: Some resources may require additional background and extra knowledge

Actions on Google

The Google Assistant developer platform lets you create software to extend the functionality of the Google Assistant with “Actions”. Actions let users get things done through a conversational interface that can range from a simple command to turn on the lights or a longer conversation, such as playing a trivia game or exploring a recipe for dinner.

As a developer, you can use the platform to easily create and manage unique and effective conversational experiences for your users.

Actions auto-generated from web content.

Codelab: Build Actions for Google Assistant using Actions Builder (Level 1)

This codelab covers beginner-level concepts for developing with Google Assistant; you do not need any prior experience with the platform to complete it. You’ll learn how to build a simple Action for the Google Assistant that tells users their fortune as they begin their adventure in the mythical land of Gryffinberg. Continue on to level 2 if you’re ready!

Codelab: Build Actions for Google Assistant using Actions SDK (Level 1)

This codelab covers beginner-level concepts for developing with the Actions SDK for Google Assistant; you do not need any prior experience with the platform to complete it.

Tip: If you prefer to work with more visual tools, do the Level 1 Actions Builder codelab instead, which creates the same Action using an in-console Actions Builder instead. View additional codelabs here.

Android Developers

Android is the world's most powerful mobile platform, with more than 2.5 billion active devices.

Build your first Android app by taking the free online Android Basics in Kotlin course created by Google. No programming experience is needed. You'll learn important concepts on how to build an app as well as the fundamentals of programming in Kotlin, the recommended programing language for developers who are new to Android. Start with the first unit: Kotlin Basics for Android!

Once you’re ready to take your app development to the next level, check out Android Basics: Unit 2 where you’ll where you'll build a tip calculator app and an app with a scrollable list of images. You can customize these apps or start building your own Android apps!

You can find more resources such as courses and documentation on developer.android.com. Stay up-to-date on the latest educational resources from the Android engineering team by following our YouTube channel, Twitter account, and subscribing to our newsletter.

Developer Student Clubs (DSC)

Developer Student Clubs are university based community groups for students interested in Google developer technologies.

DSC Solution Challenge

For two years, DSC has challenged students to solve problems in their local communities using technology. Learn the steps to get started on a real life project with tips from Arman Hezarkhani. Get inspired by the 2020 Solution Challenge winners and see what they built here.

If you’re a university student interested in joining or leading a DSC near you, click here to learn more.

Firebase

Firebase is a mobile and web applications development platform that allows you to manage and solve key challenges across the app lifecycle with its full suite of tools for building, quality, and business.

Codelab: Get to know Firebase for web

In this introductory codelab, you'll learn some of the basics of Firebase to create interactive web applications. Learn how to build and deploy an event RSVP and guestbook chat app using several Firebase products.

Codelab: Firebase web codelab

Following “Get to Know Firebase for web”, take this next codelab and you'll learn how to use Firebase to easily create web applications by implementing and deploying a chat client using Firebase products and services.

Get all the latest educational resources from the Firebase engineering team by following our YouTube channel, Twitter account, and visiting the website.

Flutter

Do you want to learn how to build natively compiled apps for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase? If the answer is yes, we have some great resources for you.

This is a guide to creating your first Flutter app. If you are familiar with object-oriented code and basic programming concepts such as variables, loops, and conditionals, you can complete this tutorial. You don’t need previous experience with Dart, mobile, or web programming.

Check out this free course from Google and Udacity, which is the perfect course if you’re brand new to Flutter.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning.

Cloud OnBoard: Core Infrastructure

In this training, learn the fundamentals of Google Cloud and how it can boost your flexibility and efficiency. During sessions and demos, you'll see the ins and outs of some of Google Cloud's most impactful tools, discover how to maximize your VM instances, and explore the best ways to approach your container strategy.

Google Cloud Codelabs and Challenges

Complete a codelab and coding challenge on Google Cloud topics such as Google Cloud Basics, Compute, Data, Mobile, Monitoring, Machine Learning and Networking.

For in-depth Google Cloud tutorials and the latest Google Cloud news, tune into our Google Cloud Platform YouTube channel!

Google Pay

Google Pay lets your customers pay with the press of a button — using payment methods saved to their Google Account. Learn how to integrate the Google Pay APIs for web and Android.

Get started integrating Google Pay APIs for Android.
Get started integrating Google Pay APIs for Web.

Google Workspace Developers

Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, includes all of the productivity apps you know and love—Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and many more.

The Google Workspace Developer Platform is a collection of tools and resources that let you customize, extend, and integrate with Google Workspace. Low-code tools such as Apps Script enables you to build customizations that automate routine tasks, and professional resources such as Add-ons and APIs enable software vendors to build applications that extend and integrate with Google Workspace.

Learn Apps Script fundamentals with codelabs

If you're new to Apps Script, you can learn the basics using our Fundamentals of Apps Script with this Google Sheets codelab playlist.

Stay updated on the newest Google Workspace developer tools and tutorials by following us on our YouTube channel and Twitter!

Material Design

Material Design is a design system, created by Google and backed by open-source code, that helps teams build high-quality digital experiences. Whether you’re building for Android, Flutter, or the web we have guidelines, code, and resources to help you build beautiful products, faster. We’ve compiled the best beginner resources here:

If you’re interested in learning more about Material Design subscribe to the brand new YouTube channel for updates, and Q&A format videos.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an open source platform for machine learning to help you solve challenging, real-world problems with an entire ecosystem of tools, libraries and community resources.

Teachable Machine

Teachable Machine is a web tool that makes creating machine learning models fast, easy, and accessible to everyone. See how you can write a machine learning model without writing any code, save models, and use them in your own future projects. The models you make with are real TensorFlow.js models that work anywhere JavaScript runs.

Machine Learning Foundations:

Machine Learning Foundations is a free training course where you’ll learn the fundamentals of building machine learned models using TensorFlow. Heads up! You will need to know a little bit of Python.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and Twitter account for all the latest in machine learning.

Celebrate more with Google

Here are other ways our friends within the ecosystem are supporting #CSEdWeek.

Google for Education

CS First Unplugged: A free computer science curriculum designed by teachers that makes coding easy to teach and fun to learn in a wide range of classrooms. Check out the website to collect more teacher resources from CS First.
Teach an Hour of Code: Flexible one-hour coding activities that can be completed online with a device, or offline and unplugged. Get started with a printable booklet with computational thinking activities for students to learn about how computer science helps us communicate and stay connected with people around the world.

Experiments with Google

A collection of innovative projects using Chrome, Android, AI, AR, Web, and more, along with helpful tools and resources to inspire others to create new experiments. New projects are added weekly, like this machine learning collaboration between Billie Eilish, YouTube Music and Google Creative Lab.

AGP 7.0: Next major release for the Android Gradle plugin

2020-12-01T15:13:00.001-08:00

Posted by Murat Yener, Developer Advocate

Today marks the release of the first Canary version of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1), together with Android Gradle plugin (AGP) version 7.0.0-alpha01. With this release we are adjusting the version numbering for our Gradle plugin and decoupling it from the Android Studio versioning scheme. In this blog post we'll explain the reasons for the change, as well as give a preview of some important changes we're making to our new, incubating Android Gradle plugin APIs and DSL.

New versioning scheme

With AGP 7.0.0 we are adopting the principles of semantic versioning. What this means is that only major version changes will break API compatibility. We intend to release one major version each year, right after Gradle introduces its own yearly major release.

Moreover, in the case of a breaking change, we will ensure that the removed API is marked with @Deprecated about a year in advance and that its replacement is available at the same time. This will give developers roughly a year to migrate and test their plugins with the new API before the old API is removed.

Alignment with Gradle's version is also why we're skipping versions 5 and 6, and moving directly to AGP 7.0.0. This alignment indicates that AGP 7.x is meant to work with Gradle 7.x APIs. While it may also run on Gradle 8.x, this is not guaranteed and will depend on whether 8.x removes APIs that AGP relies on.

With this change, the AGP version number will be decoupled from the Android Studio version number. However we will keep releasing Android Studio and Android Gradle plugin together for the foreseeable future.

Compatibility between Android Studio and Android Gradle plugin remains unchanged. As a general rule, projects that use stable versions of AGP can be opened with newer versions of Android Studio.

Java 11 requirement

You can still use Java programming language version 8 with AGP 7.0.0-alpha01 but we are changing the minimum required Java programming language version to Java 11, starting with AGP 7.0.0-alpha02. We are announcing this early in the Canary schedule and many months ahead of the stable release to allow developers time to get ready.

Incubating APIs and important API changes

This release of AGP also introduces some API changes. As a reminder, a number of APIs that were introduced in AGP 4.1 were marked as incubating and were subject to change. In fact, in AGP 4.2 some of these APIs have changed. The APIs that are currently incubating do not follow the deprecation cycle that we explain above.

Here is a summary of some important API changes.

The onVariants, onProperties and onVariantProperties blocks are removed in version 4.2 beta.
These APIs are replaced with beforeVariants and onVariants in the new androidComponents block. Both beforeVariants and onVariants can optionally use a VariantSelector to reduce the number of variants the callback will run on, based on build type, name or flavor by using withBuildType, withName and withFlavor accordingly. The lambda onVariants and beforeVariants receives is executed after AGP computes variant combinations in afterEvaluate. Nesting properties inside onVariants is removed.
Similar APIs are added to androidComponents to allow separate blocks for UnitTests (beforeUnitTest and unitTest) and AndroidTests (beforeAndroidTest and androidTest) instead of nesting tests inside variants.
Two classes used by both the old and new way of registering actions for variants were renamed. Variant is now VariantBuilder, and it is used in the beforeVariants phase. VariantProperties is now Variant and it is passed to the new onVariants block.

Let’s take a look at some of these changes. Here is a sample onVariants block which targets the release build. The onVariants block Is changed to beforeVariants and uses a variant selector in the following example.

```
android {
   …
   //onVariants.withName("release") {
   //   ...
   //}
   …
}
androidComponents {
   val release = selector().withBuildType("release")
   beforeVariants(release) { variant ->
      ...
   }
}

```

Similarly onVariantProperties block is changed to onVariants.

```
android {
   ...
   //onVariantProperties {
   //   ... 
   //}
   …
}

androidComponents.onVariants { variant ->
      ... 
}

```

Note, this customization is typically done in a plugin and should not be located in build.gradle. We are moving away from using functions with receivers which suited the DSL syntax but are not necessary in the plugin code.

We are planning to make these APIs stable with AGP 7.0.0 and all plugin authors must migrate to the new androidComponents. If you want to avoid dealing with such changes, make sure your plugins only use stable APIs and do not depend on APIs marked as incubating.

If you want to learn more about other changes coming with this release, make sure to take a look at the release notes.

Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Announcing Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) & Android Gradle plugin 7.0

2020-12-01T15:12:00.002-08:00

Posted by Jamal Eason, Product Manager

Today marks the release of the first version of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) on the canary channel, together with Android Gradle plugin (AGP) version 7.0.0-alpha01. With this release, we are adjusting the version numbering of Android Studio and our Gradle plugin. This change decouples the Gradle plugin from the Android Studio versioning scheme and brings more clarity to which year and IntelliJ version Android Studio aligns with for each release.

New versioning scheme - Android Studio

With Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) we are moving to a year-based system that is more closely aligned with IntelliJ IDEA, the IDE upon which Android Studio is built. We are changing the version numbering scheme to encode a number of important attributes: the year, the version of IntelliJ it is based on, plus feature and patch level. WIth this name change you can quickly figure out which version of the IntelliJ platform you are using in Android Studio. In addition, each major version will have a canonical codename, starting with Arctic Fox, and then proceeding alphabetically to help make it easy to see which version is newer.

We recommend that you use the latest version of Android Studio so that you have access to the latest features and quality improvements. To make it easier to stay up to date, we made the version change to clearly de-couple Android Studio from your Android Gradle Plugin version. An important detail to keep in mind is that there is no impact to the way the build system compiles and packages your app when you update the IDE. In contrast, app build process changes and APK/Bundles are dictated by your project AGP version. Therefore, it is safe to update your Android Studio version, even late in your development cycle, because your project AGP version can be updated in a different cadence than your Android Studio version. Lastly, with the new version system it is even easier than before for you or your team to run both the stable and preview versions of Android Studio at the same time on your app project as long as you keep the AGP version on a stable release.

In the previous numbering system, this release would have been Android Studio 4.3. With the new numbering system, it is now Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Canary 1 or just, Arctic Fox.

Going forward, here is how the Android Studio version number scheme will work:

<Year of IntelliJ Version>.<IntelliJ major version>.<Studio major version>

The first two number groups represent the version of the final IntellIj platform that a particular Android Studio release is based on (earlier canaries may still be on the earlier version). For this release, this is 2020.3.
The third number group represents the Studio major version, starting at 1 and incrementing by one for every major release.
To make it easier to refer to each version, we are also giving major releases a code name, incrementing from A to Z based on animal names. This initial release name is Arctic Fox.

New versioning scheme - Android Gradle plugin

With AGP 7.0.0 we are adopting the principles of semantic versioning, and aligning with the Gradle version that AGP requires. Compatibility between Android Studio and Android Gradle plugin remains unchanged. Projects that use stable versions of AGP can be opened with newer versions of Android Studio.

We will publish another post soon with more details about our AGP versioning philosophy and what is new in AGP 7.0.

What is new in Android Studio Arctic Fox

We are in early days in the feature development phase for Arctic Fox, but we have invested much of our time in addressing over 200 quality improvements and bugs across a wide range of areas in the IDE from the code editor, app inspection tools, layout editor to the embedded emulator. Check out the release notes for the specific bug fixes.

For those trying out Jetpack Compose, we have a host of new updates, like deploy @Preview composables to device/emulator:

Deploy preview composable

Also try out the new Layout Validation Tool in Arctic Fox to see how your layout responds to various screens sizes, font sizes, and Android Color Correction/Color Blind Modes. You can access this via the Layout Validation tool window when you are using the Layout Editor.

Layout Validation

Lastly, for those running MacOS (other platforms are coming soon) with the latest Android Platform tools and an Android 11 device, you can try out the IDE integration for the Wireless ADB feature by going to the Run device selection dialogue → Pair Devices Using Wi-Fi.

Menu to access Wireless ADB feature

Wireless ADB Setup Window

What’s Next

If you want to learn more about other detailed changes coming with this release for both Android Studio and the Android Gradle plugin, make sure to take a look at the release notes.

Aligning thousands of Billie Eilish covers in an infinite music video experiment

2020-12-01T10:03:00.001-08:00

Posted by Google Creative Lab

“Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish is one of the most-covered songs on YouTube, inspiring thousands of fans to upload their own versions. To celebrate all these covers, YouTube and Google Creative Lab built an AI experiment to combine all of them seamlessly in the world’s first infinite music video: Infinite Bad Guy. The experience aligns every cover to the same beat, no matter its genre, language, or instrumentation.

Finding all the covers

How do you find “Bad Guy” covers amidst all the billions of videos on YouTube? Just searching for “Bad Guy” would result in false positives, like videos of Billie being interviewed about the song, or miss covers that didn’t use the song name in their titles. YouTube’s ContentID system allows us to find videos that match the musical composition “Bad Guy” and also allows us to narrow our search to videos that appear to be performances or creative interpretations of the song. That way, we can also avoid videos where “Bad Guy” was just background music. We continue to run this search daily, collecting an ever-expanding list of potential covers to use in the experience.

Aligning all the covers to the same beat

A key part of the experience is being able to jump from cover to cover seamlessly. But fan covers of “Bad Guy” vary widely. Some might be similar to the original, like a dance video set to Billie’s track. Some might vary more in tempo and instrumentation, like a heavy metal cover. And others might diverge greatly from the original, like a clarinet version with no lyrics. How can you get all these covers on the same beat? After trying several approaches like dynamic time warping and chord recognition, we’ve found the most success with a recurrent neural network trained to recognize sections and beats of “Bad Guy.” We collaborated with our friends at IYOYO on cover alignment and they have a great writeup about the process.

Building the experience

Finding and aligning the covers is a fascinating research problem, but the crucial final step is making them explorable to everyone. We’ve tried to make it intuitive and fun to navigate all the infinite combinations, while keeping latency low so the song never drops a beat.

The experience centers around three YouTube players, a number we settled on after a lot of experimentation. Initially we thought more players would be more interesting, but the experience got chaotic and slow. Around the players we’ve added discoverable features like the hashtag drawer and stats page. Video game interfaces have been a big inspiration for us, as they combine multiple interactions in a single dashboard. We’ve also added an autoplay mode for users who want to just sit back and be taken through an ever-changing mix of covers.

We’re excited about how Infinite Bad Guy showcases the incredibly diverse talent of YouTube and the potential machine learning can have for music and creativity. Give it a try and see what beautiful, strange, and brilliant covers you can find.

Irem from Turkey shares her groundbreaking work in TensorFlow and advice for the community

2020-11-30T05:53:00.000-08:00

Posted by Jennifer Kohl, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Groups

Irem presenting at a Google Developer Group event

We recently caught up with Irem Komurcu, a TensorFlow developer and researcher at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. Irem has been a long-serving member of Google Developer Groups (GDG) Düzce and also serves as a Women Techmakers (WTM) ambassador. Her work with TensorFlow has received several accolades, including being named a Hamdi Ulukaya Girişimi fellow. As one one of twenty-four young entrepreneurs selected, she was flown to New York City last year to learn more about business and receive professional development.

With all this experience to share, we wanted you to hear how she approaches pursuing a career in tech, hones her TensorFlow skills with the GDG community, and thinks about how upcoming programmers can best position themselves for success. Check out the full interview below for more.

What inspired you to pursue a career in technology?

I first became interested in tech when I was in high school and went on to study computer engineering. At university, I had an eye-opening experience when I traveled from Turkey to the Google Developer Day event in India. It was here where I observed various code languages, products, and projects that were new to me.

In particular, I saw TensorFlow in action for the first time. Watching the powerful machine learning tool truly sparked my interest in deep learning and project development.

Can you describe your work with TensorFlow and Machine Learning?

I have studied many different aspects of Tensorflow and ML. My first work was on voice recognition and deep learning. However, I am now working as a computer vision researcher conducting various segmentation, object detection, and classification processes with Tensorflow. In my free time, I write various articles about best practices and strategies to leverage TensorFlow in ML.

What has been a useful learning resource you have used in your career?

I kicked off my studies on deep learning on tensorflow.org. It’s a basic first step, but a powerful one. There were so many blogs, codes, examples, and tutorials for me to dive into. Both the Google Developer Group and TensorFlow communities also offered chances to bounce questions and ideas off other developers as I learned.

Between these technical resources and the person-to-person support, I was lucky to start working with the GDG community while also taking the first steps of my career. There were so many opportunities to meet people and grow all around.

What is your favorite part of the Google Developer Group community?

I love being in a large community with technology-oriented people. GDG is a network of professionals who support each other, and that enables people to develop. I am continuously sharing my knowledge with other programmers as they simultaneously mentor me. The chance for us to collaborate together is truly fulfilling.

What is unique about being a developer in your country/region?

The number of women supported in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is low in Turkey. To address this, I partner with Women Techmakers (WTM) to give educational talks on TensorFlow and machine learning to women who want to learn how to code in my country. So many women are interested in ML, but just need a friendly, familiar face to help them get started. With WTM, I’ve already given over 30 talks to women in STEM.

What advice would you give to someone who is trying to grow their career as a developer?

Keep researching new things. Read everything you can get your eyes on. Technology has been developing rapidly, and it is necessary to make sure your mind can keep up with the pace. That’s why I recommend communities like GDG that help make sure you’re up to date on the newest trends and learnings.

Want to work with other developers like Irem? Then find the right Google Developer Developer Group for you, here.

Irene from Spain inspires others to learn Google technologies with her new podcast and more

2020-11-25T10:26:00.003-08:00

Posted by Erica Hanson, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs

(Irene (left) and her DSC team from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (photo prior to COVID-19)

Irene Ruiz Pozo is a former Google Developer Student Club (DSC) Lead at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena in Murcia, Spain. As one of the founding members, Irene has seen the club grow from just a few student developers at her university to hosting multiple learning events across Spain. Recently, we spoke with Irene to understand more about the unique ways in which her team helped local university students learn more about Google technologies.

Real world ML and AR learning opportunities

Irene mentioned two fascinating projects that she had the chance to work on through her DSC at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena. The first was a learning lab that helped students understand how to use 360º cameras and 3D scanners for machine learning.

(A DSC member giving a demo of a 360º camera to students at the National Museum of Underwater Archeology in Cartagena)

The second was a partnership with the National Museum of Underwater Archeology, where Irene and her team created an augmented reality game that let students explore a digital rendition of the museum’s exhibitions.

(An image from the augmented reality game created for the National Museum of Underwater Archeology)

In the above AR experience created by Irene’s team, users can create their own character and move throughout the museum and explore different virtual renditions of exhibits in a video game-like setting.

Hash Code competition and experiencing the Google work culture

One particularly memorable experience for Irene and her DSC was participating in Google’s annual programming competition, Hash Code. As Irene explained, the event allowed developers to share their skills and connect in small teams of two to four programmers. They would then come together to tackle engineering problems like how to best design the layout of a Google data center, create the perfect video streaming experience on YouTube, or establish the best practices for compiling code at Google scale.

(Students working on the Hash Code competition (photo taken prior to COVID-19)

To Irene, the experience felt like a live look at being a software engineer at Google. The event taught her and her DSC team that while programming skills are important, communication and collaboration skills are what really help solve problems. For Irene, the experience truly bridged the gap between theory and practice.

Expanding knowledge with a podcast for student developers

(Irene’s team working with other student developers (photo taken before COVID-19)

After the event, Irene felt that if a true mentorship network was established among other DSCs in Europe, students would feel more comfortable partnering with one another to talk about common problems they faced. Inspired, she began to build out her mentorship program which included a podcast where student developers could collaborate on projects together.

The podcast, which just released its second episode, also highlights upcoming opportunities for students. In the most recent episode, Irene and friends dive into how to apply for Google Summer of Code Scholarships and talk about other upcoming open source project opportunities. Organizing these types of learning experiences for the community was one of the most fulfilling parts of working as a DSC Lead, according to Irene. She explained that the podcast has been an exciting space that allows her and other students to get more experience presenting ideas to an audience. Through this podcast, Irene has already seen many new DSC members eager to join the conversation and collaborate on new ideas.

As Irene now looks out on her future, she is excited for all the learning and career development that awaits her from the entire Google Developer community. Having graduated from university, Irene is now a Google Developer Groups (GDG) Lead - a program similar to DSC, but created for the professional developer community. In this role, she is excited to learn new skills and make professional connections that will help her start her career.

Are you also a student with a passion for code? Then join a local Google Developer Student Club near you, here.

Celebrating devs from Brazil on Black Consciousness Day

2020-11-20T00:30:00.004-08:00

Posted by Patricia Correa - Director, Global Developer Marketing

Editor's note: Last night, on the eve of the Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, a Black man, João Alberto Silveira Freitas, died after being beaten at a supermarket in Porto Alegre, in the south of the country. We would like to express our sentiments to the Black community in Brazil.

Today is Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, a country where over 55% of the population identifies as Black. To commemorate, we are showcasing local developers who create apps, games and websites. Watch this video to hear about their journeys, tips and passions.

Meet the founders & developers

Vitor Eleotério, Software Engineer at iFood, a popular food delivery app in Brazil. As much as he liked technology, his colleagues used to mock and discourage him. Vitor heard many times that he would be a great security man as he is tall and strong. People kept saying that IT was only for rich people. With his passion and hard work, he proved them all wrong. Now, he wants to motivate others to also follow their dreams.

Priscila Aparecida Ferreira Theodoro, Software Engineer at Centauro, a large sports goods retailer in Brazil. Her first contact with technology happened while working at an organization that teaches programming. At 38 years old, Priscila decided to completely change careers and learn how to code. She now teaches programming to women, mentors youths, and is involved in a podcast project for women developers.

Marcos Pablo, Co-founder & CTO at G4IT Solutions, a platform that helps companies to manage and automate the work schedules of off-site teams. It was his mother who encouraged him to enter the tech world when he was in high school. By the time he was 19 years old, he was already managing a small tech company.

Iago Silva Dos Santos, Co-founder & CEO of Trazfavela Delivery, a platform for deliveries to and from favelas. He wanted to help his community, including drivers, retailers and people who wanted easier access to goods. TrazFavela is one of the first companies to receive investment from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund in Brazil.

Tiago Santos, Founder & CEO of Husky, an app for Brazilian professionals to receive international payments. As a software developer working with international clients, Tiago had experienced first hand how difficult it was to get payments from abroad. With his friend Mauricio Carvalho he created the app so professionals can focus on their careers instead of wasting time with bureaucratic tasks.

Ronaldo Valentino da Cruz, Co-founder & CEO of Oktagon, a games studio that produces indie titles and games for clients. He learned how to program when he was 14 and started working with game development in 2002 at the Universidade Federal Tecnológica do Paraná. So far, the company has launched well-received mid-core titles and worked with publishers and clients all over the world.

Nohoa Arcanjo Allgayer, Co-founder & CMO of Creators.LLC, a network that connects creative talent with potential clients. For Nohoa, it was not an easy decision to quit her previous comfortable corporate job to set up this startup. Now she is proud of the risk she took, as it opened up a world of opportunity and endless learning. She took part in the Google for Startups Residency Program. Creators.LLC was one of the first startups to receive capital from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund in Brazil.

Samuel Matias, Software Engineer at iFood. He became a developer in 2015 and is very active in the Flutter community. He frequently shares his learnings through online articles and talks.

Aline Bezzoco, Founder & Developer of Ta tudo bem? - a suicide prevention app . She feels that the best thing about technology is being able to create solutions to help people. Her app aids those struggling with mental health problems to feel calmer, less anxious and ask for help.

Egio Arruda Junior, Co-founder & CEO of EasyCrédito, a platform that facilitates loans. The main focus is to help those who don’t even have bank accounts. Egio is passionate about innovation and is always looking to create something new. He took part in two Google for Startups programs - Residency and Accelerator.

Márcio Dos Santos, Co-founder & CTO at Facio, a platform that provides loans and financial education to employees in Brazil. Amongst his family and friends, there was no one who had completed a higher education degree. He decided to study Computer Science because he was a video game fan. At University, a professor selected him to do an internship in the United States. Currently based in Seattle, USA, Márcio likes to be approached for advice by those at the beginning of their careers.

Danielle Monteiro, Data Engineer & Founder of Dani.Academy, an educational platform with free and paid courses about data, architecture, NoSQL and infrastructure. She was the first member of her family to start and finish college. She has now won many awards in and outside Brazil, and is a Google for Startups Mentor. Dani is passionate about giving back to society by sharing her knowledge through her blog, lectures, courses and articles.

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These are just some of the stories that show that the tech world is not for a few but for everyone. Together we can create change and see more Black people finding opportunities in tech. Celebrate these stories by sharing the video on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook & LinkedIn.

Coral makes edge AI even more accessible in 2020

2020-11-19T14:11:00.007-08:00

Posted by the Coral team

Since we launched Coral back in March 2019, we’ve added a number of new product form factors to accommodate the many ways users are adding on-device ML to their products. We've also streamlined the ML workflow and added capabilities like model pipelining with multiple Edge TPUs for an easier and more robust developer experience. And from this, we’ve helped enable amazing use cases from smart water meters that prevent water loss with Olea Edge, to systems for improving harvest yield with Farmwave, to noise cancellation in meetings in Google’s own Series One meeting kits.

This week, we’ll begin shipping the Coral Accelerator Module, a multi-chip module that combines the Edge TPU and it’s power circuitry into a solderable package. The module exposes PCIe and USB2 interfaces, which make it even easier to integrate Coral into custom designs. Several companies are already taking advantage of the compact size and capabilities with their new products coming to market. Read more about how Gumstix, STD, Siana Systems and IEI are using our module.

And in December, we’ll begin shipping the Dev Board Mini, a smaller, more power-efficient, and value-oriented board that brings forward a more traditional, flattened single-board computer design. The Dev Board Mini pairs a Mediatek 8167 SoC with the Coral Accelerator Module over USB 2 and is a great way to evaluate the module as the center of a project or deployment.

You can see the new Dev Board Mini and Accelerator Module in action in the latest episode of Level Up, where Markku Lepisto controls his studio lights with speech commands.

To get updates on when the board will be available for purchase and other Coral news, sign up for our newsletter.

Developing for the edge, now simplified

We recently announced a new version of the Coral ML APIs and tools. This release brings the C++ API into parity with Python and makes it more modular, reusable and performant. At the same time it eliminates unnecessary abstractions and surfaces replacing them with native TensorFlow Lite APIs. This release also graduates the Model Pipelining API out of beta and introduces a new model partitioner that automatically partitions models based on profiling and up to 10x better performance.

We’ve added a pre-trained version of MobileDet — a state-of-the-art object detection model for mobile systems — into our models portfolio. We’re migrating our model-development workflow to TensorFlow 2, and we’re including a handful of updated or new models based on the TF2 Keras framework. For details, check out the full announcement on the TensorFlow blog.

We’re also excited to see great developer tools coming from our ecosystem partners. For example, PerceptiLabs offers a visual API for building TensorFlow models and recently published a new demo which trains a machine learning model to identify sign language optimized for the edge with Coral.

The MRQ design from SigFox enables prototyping at the edge for low bandwidth IoT solutions with Coral

And SigFox released a radio transceiver board that stacks on either the Coral Dev Board or Dev Board Mini. This allows small data payloads to be transmitted across low power, long range radio networks for use cases like smart cities, fleet management, asset tracking, agriculture and energy. The PCB design will be offered as a free download on SigFox’s website. Google Cloud Solutions Architect Markku Lepisto will present the new design today, in the opening keynote at SigFox Connect.

Customers with a Coral edge

The tool, from Farmwave, includes custom-developed ML models, a harvester-mounted box with cameras, an in-cab display, and on- device AI acceleration from Coral.

Just in time for harvest we wanted to share a story about how Farmwave is using Coral to improve the efficiency of farm equipment and reduce food waste. Traditional yield loss analysis involves hand-counting grains of corn left on the ground mid harvest. It’s a time and labor intensive task, and not feasible for farmers who measure the value of their half-million-dollar combines in minutes spent running them.

By leveraging Coral’s on-device AI capabilities, Farmwave was able to build a system that automates the count while the machine is running. Thus allowing farmers to make real-time adjustments to harvesting machines in response to conditions in the field, which can make a big difference in yield.

Kura Sushi designed their intelligent QA system using a Raspberry Pi paired with the Coral USB Accelerator

Kura Revolving Sushi Bar in Japan has always been committed to the highest standards of health and safety for its customers. Known for their tech forward approach, Kura has dabbled in sushi making robots, an automated prize machine called Bikkura-pon, and a patented dome-shaped dish cover, aptly dubbed Mr. Fresh. But most recently, Kura has used Coral to develop an AI powered system that not only facilitates efficiency for better customer experiences, but also enables better tracking to prevent foodborne illnesses.

Making AI more accessible

While this year has presented the world with many obstacles, we’ve been impressed by the new ideas and innovations coming forward through technology. By providing the necessary tools and technology for edge AI, we strive to empower society to create affordable, adaptable, and intelligent systems.

We are excited to share all that Coral has to offer as we evolve our platform. For a list of worldwide distributors, system integrators and partners, visit the Coral partnerships page.

Please visit Coral.ai to discover more about our edge ML platform and share your feedback at coral-support@google.com. To receive future Coral updates directly in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.

Welcome Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to the Bazel ecosystem

2020-11-12T10:00:00.002-08:00

Posted by Joe Hicks, Product Manager, Core Developer

After significant investment in understanding how best to build the Android Platform correctly and quickly, we are pleased to announce that the Android Platform is migrating from its current build systems (Soong and Make) to Bazel. While components of Bazel have been already checked into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source tree, this will be a phased migration over the next few Android releases which includes many concrete and digestible milestones to make the transformation as seamless and easy as possible. There will be no immediate impact to the Android Platform build workflow or the existing supported Android Platform Build tools in 2020 or 2021. Some of the changes to support Android Platform builds are already in Bazel, such as Bazel’s ability to parse and execute Ninja files to support a gradual migration.

Migrating to Bazel will enable AOSP to:

Provide more flexibility for configuring the AOSP build (better support for conditionals)
Allow for greater introspection into the AOSP build progress and dependencies
Enable correct and reproducible (hermetic) AOSP builds
Introduce a configuration mechanism that will reduce complexity of AOSP builds
Allow for greater integration of build and test activities
Combine all of these to drive significant improvements in build time and experience

The benefits of this migration to the Bazel community are:

Significant ongoing investment in Bazel to support Android Platform builds
Expansion of the Bazel ecosystem and community to include, initially, tens of thousands of Android Platform developers and Android handset OEMs and chipset vendors.
Google’s Bazel rules for building Android apps will be open sourced, used in AOSP, and maintained by Google in partnership with the Android / Bazel community
Better Bazel support for building Android Apps
Better rules support for other languages used to build Android Platform (Rust, Java, Python, Go, etc)
Strong support for Bazel Long Term Support (LTS) releases, which benefits the expanded Bazel community
Improved documentation (tutorials and reference)

The recent check-in of Bazel to AOSP begins an initial pilot phase, enabling Bazel to be used in place of Ninja as the execution engine to build AOSP. Bazel can also explore the AOSP build graph. We're pleased to be developing this functionality directly in the Bazel and AOSP codebases. As with most initial development efforts, this work is experimental in nature. Remember to use the currently supported Android Platform Build System for all production work.

We believe that these updates to the Android Platform Build System enable greater developer velocity, productivity, and happiness across the entire Android Platform ecosystem.

Joe (on behalf of the Bazel and AOSP infrastructure teams)

The digital wallet is here to stay. It’s time for your business to cash in.

2020-11-12T08:32:00.005-08:00

Posted by Cole Stuart, Google Pay Product Marketing

Digital wallets are rapidly growing in popularity, as adoption from users and acceptance from businesses has expanded significantly over recent years. As we have seen in recent months, this trend towards digital payments over traditional card or cash transactions has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 40% of global ecommerce spending in 2019 came from a digital wallet like Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Alipay according to the FIS Global Payments Report¹. This year, over one billion shoppers are expected to make a digital wallet transaction.

We believe this is just the beginning. In the next five years, digital wallet adoption is expected to increase dramatically. Worldpay’s white paper explores how adopting digital wallets can benefit businesses like yours. Some of the key takeaways are highlighted below.

What digital wallets have to offer

Digital wallets, such as Google Pay, have the ability to not only improve your business outcomes, but also provide unique value to everyday consumers. Benefits include:

Higher conversion rates
Seamless checkout experience
Reduced cart abandonment
Advanced security and protection

Digital wallets vs. ordinary card transactions

Real tangible benefits are found when businesses adopt a digital wallet. Findings include:

Digital wallet transactions showed significantly higher acceptance rates and significantly lower chargeback rates for businesses compared with ordinary card transactions².

Even though transaction volumes for digital wallets were lower than cards in most markets, the value of US digital wallet transactions were on average 25% greater than ordinary card transactions in 2019².

How to bring Google Pay into your business

Ready to adopt a digital wallet and give your customers a seamless transaction experience in just 4 easy steps? Sign up with the Business Console here and visit our developer's site for more information. You can also find the full whitepaper here, alongside previous case studies that prove how Google Pay has helped drive lasting impact for other businesses.

We continue to build partnerships with top e-commerce platforms to help you easily integrate Google Pay. Please see the Google Pay plugin for Magento 2, Shopify, Big Commerce, WooCommerce, and OpenCart.

Liked our whitepaper? Reach out directly to the contacts below.

Google:

Steve Klebe

Head of PSP Partnerships, Google Pay

sklebe@google.com

Worldpay:

Rami Josef

Senior Product Manager, Worldpay

rami.josef@fisglobal.com

[1] - Worldpay by FIS Global Payments Report
[2] - Sourced from Worldpay’s Worldwide Payments Gateway (WPG) using data from Q4 2018 through Q1 2020

What do you think?

Do you have any questions? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskGooglePayDev.

Get ready for BazelCon 2020

2020-11-11T07:00:00.004-08:00

Posted by Joe Hicks, Product Manager, Core Developer

With only 24 hours to go, BazelCon 2020 is shaping up to be a much anticipated gathering for the Bazel community and broader Build ecosystem. With over 1000 attendees, presentations by Googlers, as well as talks from industry Build leaders from Twitter, Dropbox, Uber, Pinterest, GrabTaxi, and more, we hope BazelCon 2020 will provide an opportunity for knowledge sharing, networking, and community building.

I am very excited by the keynote announcements, the migration stories at Twitter, Pinterest, and CarGurus, as well as technical deep dives on Bazel persistent workers, incompatible target skipping, migrating from Gradle to Bazel, and more. The “sold out” Birds of a Feather sessions and the Live Q&A with the Bazel team will bring the community together to discuss design docs, look at landings, and provide feedback on the direction of Bazel and the entire ecosystem.

We are also pleased to announce that, starting with the next major release (4.0), Bazel will support Long Term Support (LTS) releases as well as regular Rolling releases.

Some benefits of this new release cadence are:

Bazel will release stable, supported LTS releases on a predictable schedule with a long window without breaking changes
Bazel contributors / rules owners can prepare to support future LTS releases via rolling releases.
Bazel users can choose the release cadence that works best for them, since we will offer both LTS releases and rolling releases.

Long Term Support (LTS) releases:

We will create an LTS release every ~9 months => new LTS release branch, increment major version number.
Each LTS release will include all new features, bug fixes and (breaking) changes since the last major version.
Bazel will actively support each LTS branch for 9 months with critical bug fixes, but no new features.
Thereafter, Bazel will provide maintenance for two additional years with only security and OS compatibility fixes.
Bazel Federation reboot: Bazel will provide guidance about the ruleset versions that should be used with each Bazel release so that each user will not have to manage interoperability themselves.

Make sure that you register at http://goo.gle/bazelcon to be a part of the excitement of the premier build conference!

See you all at BazelCon 2020!

By Joe Hicks and the entire Bazel Team at Google

Building a Google Workspace Add-on with Adobe

2020-10-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jon Harmer, Product Manager, Google Cloud

We recently introduced Google Workspace, which seamlessly brings together messaging, meetings, docs, and tasks and is a great way for teams to create, communicate, and collaborate. Google Workspace has what you need to get anything done, all in one place. This includes giving developers the ability to extend Google Workspace’s standard functionality like with Google Workspace Add-ons, launched earlier this year.

Google Workspace Add-ons, at launch, allowed a developer to build a single integration for Google Workspace that surfaces across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. We recently announced that we added to the functionality of Google Workspace Add-ons by enabling more of the Google Workspace applications with the newer add-on framework, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. With Google Workspace Add-ons, developers can scale their presence across multiple touchpoints in which users can engage, and simplifies processes for building and managing add-ons.

One of our early developers for Google Workspace Add-ons has been Adobe. Adobe has been working to integrate Creative Cloud Libraries into Google Workspace. Using Google Workspace Add-ons, Adobe was able to quickly design a Creative Cloud Libraries experience that felt native to Google Workspace. “With the new add-ons framework, we were able to improve the overall performance and unify our Google Workspace and Gmail Add-ons.” said Ryan Stewart, Director of Product Management at Adobe. “This means a much better experience for our customers and much higher productivity for our developers. We were able to quickly iterate with the updated framework controls and easily connect it to the Creative Cloud services.”

One of the big differences between the Gmail integration and the Google Workspace integration is how it lets users work with Libraries. With Gmail, they’re sharing links to Libraries, but with Docs and Slides, they can add Library elements to their document or presentation. So by offering all of this in a single integration, we are able to provide a more complete Libraries experience. Being able to offer that breadth of experiences in a consistent way for users is exciting for our team.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud Libraries API announced at Adobe MAX, was also integral to integrating Creative Cloud with Google Workspace, letting developers retrieve, browse, create, and get renditions of the creative elements in libraries.

Adobe’s new Add-on for Google Workspace lets you add brand colors, character styles and graphics from Creative Cloud Libraries to Google Workspace apps like Docs and Slides. You can also save styles and assets back to Creative Cloud.

With Google Workspace Add-ons, we understand that teams require many applications to get work done, and we believe that process should be simple, and those productivity applications should connect all of a company’s workstreams. With Google Workspace Add-ons, teams can bring their favorite workplace apps like Adobe Creative Cloud into Google Workspace, enabling a more productive day-to-day experience for design and marketing teams. With quick access to Creative Cloud Libraries, the Adobe Creative Cloud Add-on for Google Workspace lets eveyone easily access and share assets in Gmail and apply brand colors, character styles, and graphics to Google Docs and Slides to keep deliverables consistent and on-brand. There’s a phased rollout to users, first with Google Docs, then Slides, so if you don’t see it in the Add-on yet, stay tuned as it is coming soon.

For developers, Google Workspace Add-ons lets you build experiences that not only let your customers manage their work, but also simplify how they work.

To learn more about Google Workspace Add-ons, please visit our Google Workspace developer documentation.

How a group of young developers want to help us vote

2020-10-27T11:08:00.003-07:00

Posted by Erica Hanson, Global Program Manager, Google Developer Student Clubs

Stevens Institute of Technology’s Google Developer Student Club. Names left to right: Tim Leonard, Will Escamilla, Rich Bilotti, Justin O'Boyle, Luke Mizus, and Rachael Kondra

The Google Developer Student Club at the Stevens Institute of Technology built their own website that makes local government data user friendly for voters in local districts. The goal: Take obscure budget and transportation information, display it via an easy-to-understand UI, and help voters become more easily informed.

When Tim Leonard first moved to Hoboken, New Jersey to start school at the Stevens Institute of Technology, he was interested in anything but government. A computer science major with a deep interest in startups, one was more likely to find him at a lecture on computational structures than on political science.

However, as the founder of the Google Developer Student Club (DSC) chapter at his university, Tim and his fellow classmates had the opportunity to make the trip into New York City to attend a developer community meetup with Ralph Yozzo, a community organizer from Google Developer Groups (GDG) NYC. While Ralph had given several talks on different technologies and programming techniques, this time he decided to try something new: Government budgets.

A slide from Ralph’s presentation

Titled “Why we should care about budgets,” Ralph’s talk to the young programmers focused on why tracking government spending in their community matters. He further explained how public budgets fund many parts of our lives - from getting to work, to taking care of our health, to going to a good school. However, Ralph informed them that while there are currently laws that attempt to make this data public, a platform that makes this information truly accessible didn’t exist. Instead, most of this information is tucked away in different corners of the internet; unorganized, and hard to understand.

Tim soon realized programming could be the solution and that his team had the chance to grow in a whole new way, outside of the traditional classroom setting. With Ralph’s encouragement, Tim and his team started thinking about how they could build a platform to collect all of this data, and provide a UI that’s easy for any user to interact with. By creating a well-organized website that could pull all of this local information, streamline it, and produce easy-to-understand graphics, the DSC Stevens team imagined they could have an impact on how voters inform themselves before casting their ballots at local elections.

“What if we had a technical approach to local government? Where our site would have actionable metrics that held us accountable for getting information out to the public.”

Tim thought if local voters could easily understand how their representatives were spending their community’s money, they could use it as a new framework to decide how to vote. The next step was to figure out the best way to get started.

An image from the demo site

The DSC Stevens team quickly agreed that their goal should be to build a website about their own city, Hoboken. They named it “Project Crystal” and started taking Google App Engine courses and conducting Node.js server run throughs. With the data they would eventually store and organize, they also dove into Google Cloud demos and workshops on Google Charts. They were determined to build something that would store public information in a different way.

“Bounce rates and click through metrics ensure we evaluate our site like a startup. Instead of selling a product, our platform would focus on getting people to interact with the data that shapes their everyday lives.”

After participating in different courses on how to use Google Cloud, Maps, and Charts, they finally put it all together and created the first version of their idea - an MVP site, built to drive user engagement, that would serve as their prototype.

A video explaining the Project Crystal website

Complete with easy-to-understand budget charts, contact information for different public officials, and maps to help users locate important services, the prototype site has been their first major step in turning complicated data into actionable voting information. Excited about their progress, Tim wants to eventually host the site on Google Cloud so his team can store more data and offer the platform to local governments across the country.

Image of the DSC Steven's team adding Google Charts to their demo site

The DSC Stevens team agrees, access to resources like Project Crystal could change how we vote. They hope with the right technical solutions around data, voters will be better informed, eager to ask more of their representatives, and more willing to participate in the day-to-day work of building their communities, together.

“Our advice to other student developers is to find outlets, like DSC, that enable you to think about helping others. For us, it was figuring out how to use our Google Cloud credits for good.”

Want to start a project of your own? If you’re a university student, join a Developer Student Club near you. If you’re a professional, find the right Google Developer Group for you.