Pixel art: How designers created the new Pixel 6 colors

During a recent visit to Google’s Color, Material and Finish (better known as CMF) studio, I watched while Jess Ng and Jenny Davis opened drawer after drawer and placed object after object on two white tables. A gold hoop earring, a pale pink shell — all pieces of inspiration that Google designers use to come up with new colors for devices, including the just-launched Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.

“We find inspiration everywhere,” Jenny says. “It’s not abnormal to have a designer come to the studio with a toothbrush or some random object they found on their walk or wherever.”

The CMF team designs how a Google device will physically look and feel. “Color, material and finish are a big part of what defines a product,” Jess, a CMF hardware designer, says. “It touches on the more emotional part of how we decide what to buy.” And Jenny, CMF Manager for devices and services, agrees. “We always joke around that in CMF, the F stands for ‘feelings,’ so we joke that we design feelings.”

The new Pixel 6 comes in Sorta Seafoam and Kinda Coral, while the Pixel 6 Pro comes in Sorta Sunny and Cloudy White, and both are available in Stormy Black. Behind those five shades are years of work, plenty of trial and error…and lots and lots of fine-tuning. “It’s actually a very complex process,” Jenny says.

Mademore complex by COVID-19. Both Jenny and Jess describe the color selection process as highly collaborative and hands-on, which was difficult to accomplish while working from home. Designers aren’t just working with their own teams, but with those on the manufacturing and hardware side as well. “We don’t design color after the hardware design is done — we actually do it together,” Jenny says. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro’s new premium look and feel influenced the direction of the new colors, and the CMF team needed to see colors and touch items in order to select and eliminate the shades.

They don’t only go hands-on with the devices, they do the same with sources of inspiration. “I remember one time I really wanted to share this color because I thought it would be really appropriate for one of our products, so I ended up sending my boss one of my sweaters through a courier delivery!” Jenny says. “We found creative workarounds.”

• Photograph of various yellow to peach to pink items as well as a gold hoop earring and a Sorta Sunny Pixel 6 Pro on a white table.

• Photograph of the Stormy Black Pixel 6 next to the black case and various items in different shades of black, including a small, shiny black spoon.

• Photograph of the frosted white Pixel 6 case next to various items of shades of white, including a paper flow.

• Photograph of the Kinda Coral Pixel 6 next to a pink cube and a pale pink shell.

The team that designed the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro case colors did as well. “The CMF team would make models and then take photos of the models and I would try to go in and look at them in person and physically match the case combinations against the different phone colors,” says Nasreen Shad, a Pixel Accessories product manager. “Then we’d render or photograph them and send them around to the team to review and see if what was and wasn’t working.” In addition to the challenge of working remotely, Nasreen’s team was also working on something entirely new: colorful, translucent cases.

Nasreen says they didn’t want to cover up the phones, but complement them instead, so they went with a translucent tinted plastic. Each device has a case that corresponds to its color family, but you can mix and match them for interesting new shades.

That process involved lots of experimenting. For example, what eventually became the Golden Glow case started out closer to a bronze color, which didn’t pair as well with the Stormy Black phone. “We had to tune it to a peachy shade, so that it looked good with its ‘intended pairing,’ Sorta Sunny, but with everything else, too. That meant ordering more resins and color chips in different tones, but it ended with some really beautiful effects.”

Beautiful effects, and tons of options. “I posted a picture of all of the possible combinations you can make with the phones and the cases and people kept asking me, ‘how many phones did Google just release!?’” Nasreen laughs. “And I had to be like, ‘No, no, no, these are just the cases!’”

Google designers often only know the devices and colors by temporary, internal code names. It's up to their colleagues to come up with the names you see on the Google Store site now. But one person who absolutely knows their official names is Lily Hackett, a Product Marketing Manager who works on a team that names device colors. “The way that we go about color naming is unique,” she says. “We like to play on the color. When you think about it, it’s actually very difficult to describe color, and the colors we often use are subtle — so we like to be specific with our approach to the name.”

Because color can be so subjective (one person’s white and gold dress is another’s black and blue dress), Lily’s team often checks in with CMF designers to make sure the words and names they’re gravitating toward actually describe the colors accurately. “It’s so nice to go to color experts and say, ‘Is this right? Is this a word you would use to describe this color?’”

Lily says their early brainstorming sessions can result in lists of 75 or more options. “It’s truly a testament to our copywriting team. When we were brainstorming for Stormy Black, they had everything under the sun — they had everything under the moon! It was incredible to see how many words they came up with.”

These days, everyone is looking ahead at new colors and new names, but the team is excited to see the rest of the world finally get to see their work. “I couldn’t wait for them to come out,” Lily says. “My favorite color was even the first to sell out on the Google Store! I was like, ‘Yes, everyone else loves it, too!’”

by Molly The Keyword via The Keyword

Tech Bytes: spotlighting Black women engineers at Google

Earlier this year, Google’s Women Techmakers launched “Tech Bytes,” a series featuring Black women engineers and developers at Google. Tech Bytes supports our broader effort to spotlight Black women in tech by sharing their technical expertise, and creating a space for Black women in the industry to connect.

For our latest episode of Tech Bytes, we sat down with Kendra Claiborne, an Application Engineer at YouTube, to learn more about her role and passion for technology.

Tell us about your path to joining the tech industry. Where were you before?

My journey into tech started when I was eight years old, building websites for fun and searching online to learn how the computer works. My passion for programming led me to pursue a degree in Computer Science at the University at Buffalo. During my undergraduate years, I took an internship at a startup that specialized in building custom applications on the Salesforce platform. I was very unfamiliar with Salesforce when I first started, but I was excited to learn something new. Since that internship, I’ve built both frontend (user-facing) and backend solutions on the Salesforce platform for customers in many different industries. Those opportunities led me to the YouTube Content Partnerships Systems team in 2020.

Tell us about your role on that team. What do you do day to day?

I’m an Application Engineer, and I’ve carried my past experience into this role by focusing on building frontend and backend solutions on the Salesforce platform. Each day is slightly different from the next. My team applies the agile methodology for software development, which means we deliver feature requests or fix bugs incrementally instead of all at once. We participate in two-week “sprints” to get these done most efficiently. Leading up to a sprint, I am laser focused on mapping out the design for a feature request, which involves a lot of research and collaboration with the team and project lead. Once we've defined our approach and the tasks required to accomplish it, we focus on building out the features. I’ll spend the next 5-8 days coding, testing and submitting my code for peer review — after which, it will get deployed to our staging environments. A staging environment is like a testing ground, where we can make sure our code is working as intended before we push it live. At the end of the sprint, if our deliverables have been approved for Quality Assurance (QA) — meaning they have reliable performance and functionality — they'll be released to production.

What was the most important class or training that you took? What was a key technical takeaway?

During my undergraduate studies, I took a Data Structures and Algorithms Design course. That class was instrumental in building my problem solving skills. It taught me how to more effectively organize, store, and solve problems based on inputs of data.

Tell us about your Tech Bytes episode. What message did you want to get across?

In my Tech Bytes episode, I discuss three different topics: communicating changes across separate systems through the Publisher-Subscriber Model; building modular, reusable code, which separates functionality into independent pieces of code; and the importance of Test Driven Development. I hope that viewers learn something new and get inspired to find out more about these subjects — and maybe even use them in a future project.

Check out Kendra’s Tech Bytes episode for more, and explore other interviews on our Tech Bytes YouTube channel. You can also learn more about our efforts to spotlight Black women in tech on the Google’s Women Techmakers website.

by Rana Abdelhamid via The Keyword

A Matter of Impact: October updates from Google.org

Note: For this edition, Jacquelline Fuller is passing the pen to her colleague Hector Mujica, who leads our Economic Opportunity work, to share more about how we approach skill building and recent support from Google.org to honor Hispanic Heritage Month.

One of our goals is to help people — especially those without college degrees — gain the skills they need to pursue in-demand, higher-paying careers. This is a topic that is deeply personal to me, as a Latino in tech, and that is important to Google, as a company that strives to create greater equity and access to opportunity — particularly for underserved communities.

We know that 80% of middle-class jobs in the U.S. require a strong knowledge of digital skills, and that these jobs often pay better. That’s why we partner with nonprofit organizations to help them bring digital skilling solutions to historically underserved and excluded people, like the Latino community. We support organizations like the Hispanic Federation and Per Scholas to use solutions, like the Google Career Certificate and other digital skill training programs, that help job seekers gain the right skills to land jobs in the digital economy. These organizations provide not only training, but also the wraparound support needed to make sure participants can access jobs and success at them.

There’s not a single solution to tackle these economic challenges. In an effort to advance the dialog and create fulfilling opportunities for all, we’re also supporting research to unpack how to best support Latino digital inclusion in the workforce with organizations like Opportunity@Work and Aspen Institute’s Latino and Society Program.

In case you missed it 

To mark Hispanic Heritage Month (which runs September 15-October 15), we’re announcing a $1M grant to the Latino Community Foundation’s Latino Entrepreneur Fund to support Latino micro-entrepreneurs across rural and urban communities in California; and donating $1M+ in ads to participants in a new Latino Founders Fund, helping them reach new audiences and address funding inequities. We’re also supporting Latinos searching for jobs: we announced a $1 million reinvestment in the Hispanic Federation.

10:25

Hear from one of our grantees: Hispanic Federation

Frankie Miranda is the President and CEO of the Hispanic Federation. Their mission is to empower the Latino community by increasing the capacity of Latino-led and Latino-serving community-based organizations (CBOs) with funding, technical assistance and a resource sharing network.

A few words with a Google.org Fellow: Rosalva Gallardo

Rosalva Gallardo is a Program Manager for Google Shopping.

by Jacquelline Fuller via The Keyword

Email is 50 years old, and still where it’s @

50 years ago this month, Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. He was a programmer working on ARPANET, the system that laid the groundwork for what would become the internet as we know it today. He tested the messaging system by sending emails to himself, and later said that the first note was probably something like “QWERTYUIOP.”

More than 30 years after this breakthrough, a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit conducted his own email experiments. In a 2005 blog post, Paul described the problem he was trying to solve:

“My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble…I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it.” These pain points are part of what motivated Paul to come up with a better system — Gmail.

Buchheit created Gmail as a browser-based email program that allowed users to easily search their own messages. “With Gmail, I got the opportunity to change email — to build something that would work for me, not against me.” He wasn’t sure what the reception would be like, but when he released a beta to fellow Googlers, they wanted more.

Eventually, Gmail launched to the public on April 1, 2004. Its search function was lightning fast and it came with 1 GB of storage — 500 times more than prevailing inboxes of the time. But that wasn’t enough to convince people it wasn’t a joke. (The date — April Fool’s Day — likely had something to do with it.)

Despite the launch day hijinks, Gmail won consumers over, and became a central part of the work we do at Google. But we never could have done it if Ray Tomlinson hadn’t hit that @ sign and started it all 50 years ago. To celebrate, we asked a few Googlers to share their favorite Gmail hacks.

Laura Mae Martin, Executive Productivity Advisor

“It's hard to answer old emails when there are shiny new ones coming in. Use features like Snooze and Starred emails and different inbox setups to make it easier to stay on task.”

John Shriver-Blake, Senior Product Manager, Gmail Enterprise

“I’m a fan of confidential mode in Gmail. It lets you protect sensitive information in messages and attachments and ensures that whoever receives the confidential email can’t forward, copy or print it.”

Neena Kamath, Product Lead, Gmail

"What I love about Gmail is how it's evolved over the years. Fifteen years ago, I was obsessed with Conversation View! Back then, having all your emails about a single topic in one place hadn't been done before, and it saved me so much time. Now, I'm obsessed with Smart Reply. It not only saves me time, but also makes me more polite : )!"

Bao Lam, Head of Marketing, Gmail & Chat

“Schedule send in Gmail means that I don’t clutter up people’s inboxes if I’m catching up on emails at odd moments — which is especially helpful when so many of us are working across different time zones.”

You can learn more about the history of email, Gmail and the power of the @ sign over on the Cloud blog.

by Dominic SmithGoogle Workspace via The Keyword

Expanding pathways into higher education and the workforce

Google believes that to have sustainable economic growth, we must have inclusive growth. It is why we developed the Grow with Google digital skills training program, which provides free training to help individuals grow their careers and businesses. Through our digital skilling programs and Google.org grantees, we have helped put nearly 170,000 Americans into new jobs, and of these, 67% are from underrepresented groups, including 44% women. Our Google Career Certificates, available on Coursera, have helped people enter high-growth career fields including Data Analytics, IT Support, Project Management and User Experience Design. Because we believe that collective action is key to success, we created a network of more than 150 companies who accept the Grow with Google Certificates as credentials for roles, including Walmart, Infosys, Verizon and of course, Google (and we are hiring, by the way!).

Today, we’re announcing an expansion of our Google Career Certificates program, including furthering our partnerships with community colleges, translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit and partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs.

1. Providing community colleges with free access to Google Career Certificates

Community colleges are critical to workforce development and economic mobility, providing accessible education options for millions of Americans and opening doors to opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach. With 44% of American undergraduates attending community colleges, and as the primary institutions serving students from underrepresented groups, there is no doubt they play an invaluable role across the U.S.

Beginning today, the Google Career Certificate program is free for all community colleges and career and technical education (CTE) high schools to add to their curriculum. We will also be partnering with the American Association of Community Colleges, the primary advocacy group for U.S. community colleges and their 12 million students. All of these schools will now be able to onboard this curriculum for free.

2. Translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit

All our Google Career Certificates are now recommended by the American Council on Education for up to 12 college credits (the equivalent to four college courses). For the more than 36 million Americans who have some post-secondary education but no college degree, Google Career Certificates can help provide an affordable on-ramp back to earning their diploma.

3. Partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs

We are also partnering with four-year universities that are accepting credit for the Google Career Certificates, including Northeastern, Purdue Global, Arizona State University and SUNY, to help increase earning potential and provide students with direct pathways to jobs. For example, a psychology major who acquires data analysis skills can unlock more than 100,000 additional entry-level jobs paying on average $60,000, versus $39,000 for psychology majors overall.

What inspires us to do this work are the real-life stories we hear every day. Like Chelsea Rucker, who was struggling to make ends meet before she took the Google IT Support Certificate through our grantee Goodwill and got a job at Google. Or Natalie Burns, who, while attending community college in Texas, earned her IT certificate and got a job in cybersecurity with a salary three times higher than her previous retail role. These are the stories that drive us, and we will continue to help people develop the digital skills they need to participate in this economy, and gain confidence that they have valuable options for their future.

• According to Emsi Burning Glass, history majors who acquire data analysis skills can increase their entry-level salaries by 38%, from an average of $40,000 per year to an average of $55,000 per year.

  Data analysis skills can help history majors increase their entry-level earning potential.

• According to Emsi Burning Glass, psychology majors who acquire IT management skills can increase their entry-level salaries by 35%, from an average of $40,000 per year to an average of $54,000 per year.

  IT management skills can help psychology majors increase their entry-level earning potential.

• According to Emsi Burning Glass, English language and literature majors who acquire project management skills can increase their entry-level salaries by 29%, from an average of $42,000 per year to an average of $54,000 per yea

  Project management skills can help English language and literature majors increase their entry-level earning potential.

• According to Emsi Burning Glass, sociology majors who acquire user experience or user interface design skills can increase their entry-level salaries by 32%, from an average of $53,000 per year to an average of $70,000 per year.

  User experience/user interface design skills can help sociology majors increase their entry-level earning potential.

by Ruth Porat via The Keyword

Opening up COP26 to the world with Google Arts & Culture

For nearly three decades, the UN has been bringing together almost every country on Earth for climate summits called COP, which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties.’ Many believe this year’s summit, COP26, is the world’s best chance to get runaway climate change under control. The UK is asking influential world leaders to bring their plans for real world changes to Glasgow, plans that will help swiftly bring down emissions — from coal to cars to cash — and limit global warming to the 1.5 degree maximum.

But while world leaders gather to discuss their commitments, the people and groups who are fighting for climate action are being showcased. Organized by the UK Government, this is the area where the public, civil society, indigenous peoples, youth groups, charities, academics, artists and businesses can have their voices heard at COP26, through an extensive programme of events, workshops, talks and exhibitions that promote dialogue, awareness, education and commitments.

Visit the COP26 Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture

A new virtual exhibition on the Google Arts & Culture platform will be an exciting part of the Green Zone giving people an insight into what’s happening from wherever they are in the world. It will provide a window into climate action, and the Green Zone, with over 60 multimedia stories showcasing some of the organizations and communities that will be present at COP26.

Inspiring stories

By visiting the Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture, people can discover a wide range of exhibitors and stories. This includes Conservation Volunteers in the UK, who connect people to the green spaces that form a vital part of any happy healthy community. Their teams of dedicated, passionate staff and volunteers work with communities across the UK helping preserve nature, build gardens and grow inclusive and diverse communities. By 2025 they pledge to have planted five million trees.

The “India One” Solar Thermal Power Plant illustrates how the Brahma Kumari community came together to build a solar thermal power plant in Rajasthan. People can learn about this and hear how the project was born by a commitment to living in harmony with nature.

And from all sectors, people are considering what climate action means for them. In the arts, Reimagining Museums for Climate Action is an initiative to explore how a fundamental questioning of what a museum is can make them tools to empower the climate vulnerable.

COP26 has four goals, one of which is adaptation, helping communities to adjust to actual or expected future climates. We know that the most vulnerable are at the greatest risk from climate change, and that they have done the least to cause it. Action to address this and build resilience is needed now, before more people lose their lives or livelihoods. The international community must unite and support people who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the changing climate.

In October 2013, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the province of Bohol, Philippines, causing land subsidence in some of its small island communities. Now, the islands of Batasan, Pangapasan, Ubay and Bilangbilangan in the municipality of Tubigon experience partial or complete flooding even during normal spring tides.

Coming face-to-face with a hundred years’ worth of sea level rise, the island communities have demonstrated great resilience. In 2017, the Racing the King Tide research team filmed a series of micro documentaries which were played to the Local Government Unit in Tubigon in 2018.

These and dozens more stories are available in the COP26 Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture and we are delighted to be sharing them with the world. Climate change affects us all. By opening up the Green Zone to the world with Google, we can all learn more about it, be inspired and moved by stories from around the globe, and gain a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities for our planet.

• A picture of a group of conservation volunteers in London holding wheelbarrows by a wetland

  The Conservation Volunteers in London

• A picture of the India-One solar thermal power plant

  India-One Solar Thermal Power Plant

• An illustration of a dome in a landscape setting, reimagining what museums for climate action could look like

  What if museums were small places that supported communities in addressing local climate challenges and actions?

• A picture of boats on a body of water bordering island houses

  Racing the King Tide: islands adapting to sea level rise

by Allegra Stratton via The Keyword

Supporting journalism in Africa

Citizen journalism is playing a crucial role in helping South African communities unite. Food for Manzi is one organization which tells the untold stories of rural communities and agriculture in South Africa to challenge stereotypes and spread positivity. With support from the Google News Initiative, they set up the Sinelizwi citizen journalism project which trained 62 citizens from all nine Provinces to tell local stories to empower and unite local communities.

Projects like this are why Google invests in the Google News Initiative (GNI), and this week we held the first GNI for Africa event.

The event is an opportunity for journalists, publishers and content creators in Africa to find out more about Google’s training programmes for journalists and news business professionals. From understanding how small and medium size news organizations can grow their digital business to how to use consumer insights and data to better understand reader preferences and increase profitability and engagement, the event brings together experts from Google and the industry to share tools, training and best practices.

The news landscape in Africa is changing fast. In five years, the number of people accessing digital platforms for news content has almost doubled, opening up access to news and supporting a new generation of independent and digital media. Yet not everyone has the opportunity to access digital media, and many more people and communities are not represented in the news. Organizations working to change this, like Pulse in Nigeria, were also part of the event. They spoke about how they have used new digital formats to engage a mass youth audience and developed formats like Explainers to provide additional — and very much needed — context to the flow of information.

At the event, we also announced a partnership with UNESCO to further invest in training for journalists in Africa. Using its networks of established journalism schools, UNESCO will launch a collaborative programme to update journalism education and training programmes run by over 100 expert institutions in Africa, enabling them to better respond to the major changes in journalism and publishing in recent times. This new training initiative will roll out over the next 18 months.

Google is increasing its investment in and support of journalism in Africa, including hiring a News Lab Teaching Fellow who provides locally relevant training for journalists in Southern Africa and programmes such as the Digital Growth Programme andInnovation Challenges which support publishers in their digital transformation. To be part of this training send an email to newslabsupport@google.com.

Watch the sessions from the event on YouTube.

by Nitin GajriaGoogle Africa via The Keyword

Daylight Saving Time tips from Google's sleep scientist

As the days get shorter and colder, it’s getting much harder for us to step out from under our bed covers and into the dark morning. When Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend in Europe and the weekend after in North America, we’ll need to adjust ourselves even more. So, what’s the best way to deal with the new sleeping schedule?

The Nest team spoke to Dr. Logan Schneider who gave us five tips to get your winter sleep schedule ready. Originally a sleep scientist at Stanford Medicine, Logan is now the sleep expert at Google Health. He’s also the brain behind Sleep Sensing on the new Google Nest Hub, the smart screen that helps you get a better night's sleep.

Start adjusting on time… or don’t adjust at all

That extra hour of sleep this weekend can feel like jet lag for some. Soon, your sleep rhythm might make you want to go to bed earlier than usual. Logan's advice is to start preparing a few days in advance to make the transition easier for your body. Dr. Logan says: “Rather than shifting your bedtime and wake time by an hour at once, you could try shifting them over four days, so that’s by 15 minutes a day. Start two days before the clocks change, and wrap up two days after.”

The time change can be even more dreadful for kids and their parents. Dr. Logan applies the same principles to kids as above, but makes the night of the time change extra fun: “I allow my kids to wake up 15 minutes later on the Friday before the time change, and again on Saturday morning. On Saturday night, the kids get to stay up an hour later than usual. I make sure we're watching a movie in a bright light environment, because that helps push the clock a bit later. They wake up at the usual time on Sunday.”

For adults, there might be an even better way: why adjust to the new schedule at all? “You could simply take advantage of being an early bird and just stay on the earlier schedule”, Logan says. Nest Hub with Sleep Sensing can help you monitor your sleep schedule and provide a new bedtime and wake time recommendation after the transition.

Find your perfect room temperature

People often think that a cool room (16-19˚C or 61-66˚F) is better for sleeping, but according to Dr. Logan, there is no one-size-fits-all temperature in the bedroom. He recommends finding a temperature that is comfortable for you throughout the night. An uncomfortably cold or warm bedroom can affect the quality of your REM sleep, which is an important phase of your night's rest.

Nest Hub keeps track of the average temperature at night. Did you sleep well? Great! Take note of the temperature that Nest Hub measured for you on the Sleep Quality page and make sure that your bedroom is set to that temperature from now on.

Embrace the winter cold once you wake up

We’ve all been there: the alarm goes off, your eyes won't open and the thought of walking in the cold to the bathroom makes you want to stay in bed even more. However, embracing a cold winter’s day is actually a good idea.

Dr. Logan says: “The cold can serve as a cue to your body that it’s time to wake up. So, while you may not want to leave your cozy bed, walking around on a cool floor or washing your face with cold water can be just the invigorating experience your body needs to get going in the morning.”

Never snooze again

As the saying goes: You snooze, you lose. Dr. Logan says: “When using the snooze function, not only are you delaying the inevitable, you’re also not using the extra time well. Falling back to sleep after an alarm takes time. Between each ring of the alarm you’re not getting as much sleep as you think. Your brain can spend up to half of the time falling back to sleep!”

In short, your snoozy nap isn’t really that helpful. It’s better to get up immediately when your alarm goes off.

Imitate a sunrise

Humans are naturally accustomed to waking up to sunlight. Yet, in the winter months, waking up during a dark morning might feel like waking up in the middle of the night. Light plays a key role in your sleep rhythm, says Dr. Logan: “It’s important to use light to help wake up, because your body relies on exposure to light when you’re waking up to set its internal clock for the next sleep period.”

Fortunately, Nest Hub’s Sunrise Alarm helps you wake up from your deepest sleep peacefully. It gradually brightens up the screen, just like a sunrise, and then slowly increases the alarm volume. Good morning sunshine!

by Rachid FingeGoogle Netherlands via The Keyword

Our work to keep you safe online is never done

At Google, we keep more people safe online than anyone else with products that are secure by default, private by design and put you in control of your data. To celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’ve introduced new features and technologies that keep your data private and secure.

Protecting your privacy with products that are secure by default

Protecting your privacy starts with the most advanced digital security. That’s why we make our products secure by default and help keep your data safe with customized recommendations in Security Checkup, an easy, personalized way to secure your Google Account. So whether you’re browsing the web, managing your inbox, or sharing your vacation photos, we’re keeping you safe with automatic protections built right into our products. Today we’re excited to share some new security products and features:

• Introducing the New Security Hub on Pixel: The Security Hub brings all your security-related features and settings into one place on your Pixel device. In the hub, you'll see a clear red, yellow, or green indication of whether your system is secure based on inputs from Google Play Protect to your Google Account. If there's something wrong, the Hub will give you straightforward recommendations of what's wrong and what to do next. This feature is currently only available on Pixel devices, but we have plans to roll this out to our entire ecosystem in the future.
• Google Fi Announces End-to-End Encrypted Calls: On top of built-in VPN and spam blocking features included in all phone plans, Google Fi is introducing end-to-end encrypted calls. One-to-one calls between Android phones on Fi will be secured with end-to-end encryption by default when they become available in the coming weeks, so your phone conversations stay between you and the person you're talking to.
• Google One Announces VPN Expansion to New Countries: VPN by Google One keeps your network activity safer from hackers and online eavesdroppers. Already available on Android for Google One members on Premium plans (2 TB and higher) in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, starting today, we’ll begin rolling out the VPN in 10 more countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
• New Safe Browsing in Android Messages & Chat: Enables stronger protections against phishing and malware attacks, checks uncommon URLs in real-time to assess threats, and temporarily links data to your Google Account to offer tailored protection.
• Chrome HTTPS-First Mode: HTTPS is a secure and private way for users to communicate with websites, reducing the risk of threats like network eavesdropping. With HTTPS-First Mode activated, Chrome will upgrade its connection to all pages a user visits to HTTPS. If HTTPS isn’t supported, the user will be shown a warning before loading a site with a less secure connection.

Building products that are Private by Design

Protecting user privacy is core to how we conceptualize, design, and build our products. This means continuously making thoughtful decisions about when, how, and why data is used in our products – and minimizing data use and retention when possible.

That’s why we’ve worked to create and open source privacy preserving technologies like Differential Privacy and Federated Learning. These technologies allow us to give you a customized experience without identifying individuals and while minimizing the amount of data that’s collected.

Ephemeral Learning is another privacy preserving technology that we’ve used to help train the models that power some of our most helpful features. Ephemeral Learning is a privacy-preserving technique that applies to cases where the training model runs on Google’s servers. Incoming data samples are stored in short-term memory for a training algorithm to learn from, and then they’re deleted within minutes. These samples are processed without any additional user signals, and without humans ever looking at the data. This technique allows us to train the models that power features like voice-to-text transcription while preserving privacy and reducing the amount of data stored.

We’ve also recently developed and open sourced Private Set Membership – a privacy preserving technology that makes it possible for an individual device to check membership against a dataset while maintaining the privacy of both the device and the dataset. This builds on our previous work on Private Join and Compute. As always, we’re committed to open sourcing and making these technologies widely available for developers around the world.

You’re in Control with Powerful Privacy and Security Settings

You should be able to choose the privacy settings that are right for you, with controls that are easy to use and understand and available right in the product when you need them. That’s why we created one place to manage settings in your Google Account, introduced Auto-Delete options, and created controls that appear in context when you’re using our products.

Back in May, our Photos team introduced Locked Folder on Pixel - a passcode-protected space where you can save photos and videos separately, so they won't show up as you scroll through Google Photos or any other apps on your device. We’re excited to share that this feature is coming to Google Photos on Android soon, and to iOS early next year.

In May, our Photos team introduced Locked Folder on Pixel - a passcode-protected space where you can save photos and videos separately.

October may be Cybersecurity Awareness Month, but our work to keep you safe online is never done. Visit our Safety Center to learn all the ways we’re making every day safer with Google.

by Royal Hansen via The Keyword

Introducing Pathways: A next-generation AI architecture

When I reflect on the past two decades of computer science research, few things inspire me more than the remarkable progress we’ve seen in the field of artificial intelligence.

In 2001, some colleagues sitting just a few feet away from me at Google realized they could use an obscure technique called machine learning to help correct misspelled Search queries. (I remember I was amazed to see it work on everything from “ayambic pitnamiter” to “unnblevaiabel”). Today, AI augments many of the things that we do, whether that’s helping you capture a nice selfie, or providing more useful search results, or warning hundreds of millions of people when and where flooding will occur. Twenty years of advances in research have helped elevate AI from a promising idea to an indispensable aid in billions of people’s daily lives. And for all that progress, I’m still excited about its as-yet-untapped potential – AI is poised to help humanity confront some of the toughest challenges we’ve ever faced, from persistent problems like illness and inequality to emerging threats like climate change.

But matching the depth and complexity of those urgent challenges will require new, more capable AI systems – systems that can combine AI’s proven approaches with nascent research directions to be able to solve problems we are unable to solve today. To that end, teams across Google Research are working on elements of a next-generation AI architecture we think will help realize such systems.

We call this new AI architecture Pathways.

Pathways is a new way of thinking about AI that addresses many of the weaknesses of existing systems and synthesizes their strengths. To show you what I mean, let’s walk through some of AI’s current shortcomings and how Pathways can improve upon them.

Today's AI models are typically trained to do only one thing. Pathways will enable us to train a single model to do thousands or millions of things.

Today’s AI systems are often trained from scratch for each new problem – the mathematical model’s parameters are initiated literally with random numbers. Imagine if, every time you learned a new skill (jumping rope, for example), you forgot everything you’d learned – how to balance, how to leap, how to coordinate the movement of your hands – and started learning each new skill from nothing.

That’s more or less how we train most machine learning models today. Rather than extending existing models to learn new tasks, we train each new model from nothing to do one thing and one thing only (or we sometimes specialize a general model to a specific task). The result is that we end up developing thousands of models for thousands of individual tasks. Not only does learning each new task take longer this way, but it also requires much more data to learn each new task, since we’re trying to learn everything about the world and the specifics of that task from nothing (completely unlike how people approach new tasks).

Instead, we’d like to train one model that can not only handle many separate tasks, but also draw upon and combine its existing skills to learn new tasks faster and more effectively. That way what a model learns by training on one task – say, learning how aerial images can predict the elevation of a landscape – could help it learn another task -- say, predicting how flood waters will flow through that terrain.

We want a model to have different capabilities that can be called upon as needed, and stitched together to perform new, more complex tasks – a bit closer to the way the mammalian brain generalizes across tasks.

Today's models mostly focus on one sense. Pathways will enable multiple senses.

People rely on multiple senses to perceive the world. That’s very different from how contemporary AI systems digest information. Most of today’s models process just one modality of information at a time. They can take in text, or images or speech — but typically not all three at once.

Pathways could enable multimodal models that encompass vision, auditory, and language understanding simultaneously. So whether the model is processing the word “leopard,” the sound of someone saying “leopard,” or a video of a leopard running, the same response is activated internally: the concept of a leopard. The result is a model that’s more insightful and less prone to mistakes and biases.

And of course an AI model needn’t be restricted to these familiar senses; Pathways could handle more abstract forms of data, helping find useful patterns that have eluded human scientists in complex systems such as climate dynamics.

Today's models are dense and inefficient. Pathways will make them sparse and efficient.

A third problem is that most of today’s models are “dense,” which means the whole neural network activates to accomplish a task, regardless of whether it’s very simple or really complicated.

This, too, is very unlike the way people approach problems. We have many different parts of our brain that are specialized for different tasks, yet we only call upon the relevant pieces for a given situation. There are close to a hundred billion neurons in your brain, but you rely on a small fraction of them to interpret this sentence.

AI can work the same way. We can build a single model that is “sparsely” activated, which means only small pathways through the network are called into action as needed. In fact, the model dynamically learns which parts of the network are good at which tasks -- it learns how to route tasks through the most relevant parts of the model. A big benefit to this kind of architecture is that it not only has a larger capacity to learn a variety of tasks, but it’s also faster and much more energy efficient, because we don’t activate the entire network for every task.

For example, GShard and Switch Transformer are two of the largest machine learning models we’ve ever created, but because both use sparse activation, they consume less than 1/10th the energy that you’d expect of similarly sized dense models — while being as accurate as dense models.

So to recap: today’s machine learning models tend to overspecialize at individual tasks when they could excel at many. They rely on one form of input when they could synthesize several. And too often they resort to brute force when deftness and specialization of expertise would do.

That’s why we’re building Pathways. Pathways will enable a single AI system to generalize across thousands or millions of tasks, to understand different types of data, and to do so with remarkable efficiency – advancing us from the era of single-purpose models that merely recognize patterns to one in which more general-purpose intelligent systems reflect a deeper understanding of our world and can adapt to new needs.

That last point is crucial. We’re familiar with many of today’s biggest global challenges, and working on technologies to help address them. But we’re also sure there are major future challenges we haven’t yet anticipated, and many will demand urgent solutions. So, with great care, and always in line with our AI Principles, we’re crafting the kind of next-generation AI system that can quickly adapt to new needs and solve new problems all around the world as they arise, helping humanity make the most of the future ahead of us.

by Jeff Dean via The Keyword

5 lessons from a blogger with 500,000 readers

Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is from Ryan Robinson, blogger and podcaster from ryrob.com.

Interested in growing your blog’s audience? Over the past few years, I’ve built an audience of over 500,000 readers — and today, I wanted to share some of the best strategies I’ve learned.

With some repetition and a healthy dose of creativity, putting just one of these tips into practice could help you double (or even triple!) your readership.

Lesson 1: Use video to show your human side

Video is a great way to build an instant connection with new visitors — whether it’s an introduction video on your homepage, or tutorial videos within your blog posts. This humanizes you and helps you connect more deeply with your audience. Readers can actually hear your voice, see your body language, and get to know you better.

You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to get started. You can use your smartphone to record a quick introduction of yourself and your blog. Host it on YouTube, then embed it on your blog’s homepage or “About” page to welcome new readers.

Lesson 2: Get featured in top publications

Getting featured in a top publication is a great way to bring in readers. It also shows that you’re a credible source of information. Take a look at the “Featured on” section on my blog’s homepage.

You might not be able to go straight to the top, so start by guest posting for larger blogs in your niche. Aim for websites that are just a few steps ahead of where you are today.

For example, rather than reaching straight for your dream publications when your blog is still relatively new, focus your guest posting efforts on sites that have somewhere in the tens of thousands of monthly readers. For more guidance and steps for getting published on larger sites in time, check out my guide to guest blogging.

Lesson 3: Create valuable content

To attract an audience, you need content that is valuable to your readers. And it's important for your content to not only be educational, but engaging too.

I focus on building content that is…

• Comprehensive: Going more in-depth than your competitors can help you win loyal readers and encourage people to share your content.
• Easy to read: Aim for short paragraphs, subheadings and lists so your readers are more likely to stay engaged on the page.
• Well-structured: A clear post structure carries readers along without them ever feeling lost or confused. Plus, structuring your posts first helps you create content consistently.

Lesson 4: Craft a great intro (hook)

You don’t have long to make an impression online — just seconds, at most. Sure, headlines are important, but the introduction is also crucial.

A great way to begin your post is with a question or a promise. This immediately shows the reader that you understand their problem, and you’re going to help them solve it.

Take, for example, my guide about how to name a blog. It begins with the headline, “How to Name a Blog (the Smart Way): 40 Genius Blog Name Ideas (and Examples) to Get Inspired.” Here’s where the introduction takes over:

“There’s both an art and science to learning how to name a blog that tells readers about who you are, the topics you’re blogging about and more. So, what are you going to name your blog? Let’s dive into this ultimate guide, then look at some blog name ideas and examples to inspire your decision.”

In this introduction, I start with the promise that readers will learn how to choose a blog name that explains who they are and gives their audience useful context. Then, I restate the question, before sharing how we’ll work through that challenge together.

Lesson 5: Write in-depth answers in online forums

I’ve also built a presence in online forums to grow my readership. I’ll write answers on Quora, engage in discussions on GrowthHackers, and participate in Q&As on Producthunt.

I spend time finding questions that are relevant to my niche and writing in-depth responses. If the opportunity presents itself, I’ll include a link to one of my articles in my answer. This doesn’t draw tons of traffic overnight, but it adds up over time.

Ultimately, it takes time to build your audience. You may only have 100 monthly readers right now, but you can dramatically grow your audience with these tips. In fact, by this time next year, you might be well on your way to having hundreds of thousands of readers.

by Ryan Robinson via The Keyword

8 more things to love about the new Pixel phones

Last week we unveiled the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro — and we unveiled a lot. Aside from the two new phones themselves, there was also Google Tensor, our custom system on a chip (SoC) that takes advantage of our machine learning research. Then there’s Magic Eraser, which will take unwanted people and objects out of your photos — plus Pixel Pass, a new way to buy, and a ton of new features packed into Android 12.

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Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro

The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro have arrived, and so have plenty of new features.

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Amid all thenew, you may have missed a thing or two. But don’t worry, we went ahead and collected everything you might have missed, and some extras, too.

1. One of the key differences between Pixel 6 and previous editions is the radical redesign of the hardware encasedin aluminum and glass.

2. Real Tone is a significant advancement, making the Pixel 6 camera more equitable, and that’s not all: It also improves Google Photos' auto enhance feature on Android and iOS with better face detection, auto white balance and auto exposure, so that it works well across skin tones.

3. Speech recognition has been updated to take advantage of Google Tensor so you can do more with voice. We’ve added automatic punctuation while dictating and support for voice commands like “send” and “clear” to send a message or edit it. With new emoji support, I can just say “Hey Google, type ‘pasta emoji.’” (Which, I admit, is going to get a lot of use.)

4. We’ve partnered with Snap to bring exclusive Snapchat features to the Pixel. For example, you can set it up so when you tap the back of your Pixel 6 or Pixel 6 Pro twice, it will launch the Snapchat selfie camera.

5. When you're flipping through your photos on a Pixel 6 or Pixel 6 Pro, Google Photos can proactively suggest using Magic Eraser to remove photobombers in the background.

6. The camera bar is a major new hardware design feature in the Pixel 6, and part of the reason it’s there is to fit a much bigger sensor, which captures more light so photos look sharper — in fact, the new sensor lets in 150% more light than that of the Pixel 5’s. The Pixel Pro 6’s Telephoto camera also uses a prism inside the camera to bend the light so the lens can fit inside the camera bar.

7. The Pixel 6 comes in Kinda Coral, Sorta Seafoam and Stormy Black, and the Pixel 6 Pro comes in Cloudy White, Sorta Sunny and the same Stormy Black. These shades are stunning on their own, but you can customize them even more with the new translucent cases: Combine the Sorta Seafoam Pixel 6 with the Light Rain case for an icy new look.

8. New in Android 12 and exclusive to Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, Gboard now features Grammar Correction. Not only will it make communication easier, but it will also work entirely on-device to preserve privacy. You can learn more over on the Google AI blog.

by Molly The Keyword via The Keyword

Protecting your Google Fi calls with end-to-end encryption

What you share with friends, family and others on phone calls is your business. Google Fi has always been committed to keeping your personal information safe, and we want to help you keep your personal conversations private, too. That’s why today, we're announcing end-to-end encrypted calls, starting with Android phones on Fi.

What is end-to-end encryption?

End-to-end encryption is a complex term for a simple idea: that no one besides you and the person you’re talking to should be able to hear what you're saying over the phone. End-to-end encryption has become an industry standard for real-time communications such as messaging — and now, we’re bringing it to phone calls, right from your Phone app. Calls between two Android phones on Fi will be secured with end-to-end encryption by default, so you can have peace of mind knowing your calls are staying between you and the person you’re talking to.

End-to-end encryption is the latest addition to the collection of privacy and security features that come included at no extra charge in all Fi plans, alongside our built-in VPN for a private online connection and spam blocking to stop unwanted calls.

How does end-to-end encryption work on Fi?

With this feature, you’ll notice new audio and visual cues to let you know that your calls with other Android phones on Fi are protected with end-to-end encryption. When placing an eligible call, you'll hear a unique ringing tone and see a lock symbol on the screen just before being connected. You and the person you’re calling will also see a lock symbol on their screen during the call.

For more security in your texts, Messages by Google already automatically encrypts your one-on-one conversations when both you and the person you're messaging have Messages and chat features enabled. This ensures no one can read the content of your messages as they travel between your phone and the phone of the person you're messaging.

End-to-end encrypted calls will begin rolling out for one-to-one calls between Android phones on Fi in the coming weeks. In the meantime, learn more about other ways Fi helps keep you safe.

by Daniel ChakGoogle Fi via The Keyword

Widgets just got better on Android 12

Last week, we announced new widgets for Android to bring helpful content and actions from your Google apps right to your Home screen. And today, they’re officially live. Here’s a rundown of what’s now available, and what we’re most excited about.

Personalization with Material You

Your device should be just as unique as you are, so we’ve redesigned our widgets to bring the best of Material You to your Android phone.

All widgets can be resized so you can fit different combinations on your phone screen based on what’s important to you. As you resize, your widgets will change. If you make your widgets bigger, you’ll get more functionality (more space means we can squeeze in more useful features).

And on select Android 12 devices — including the Pixel 3 or later — widgets will dynamically change color as you move each one around your chosen wallpaper.

Resize each widget to best suit you.

Easy directions with Maps

If you’re on the go, the new Google Maps widget makes it easy to find what you’re looking for and puts helpful actions within reach. For example, if you’re looking for the nearest coffee shop or gas station, you can quickly search for them with just one tap from the widget.

The Google Maps widget, with quick, tappable search suggestions.

Help with your to-do list

Google Keep widgets can help you manage that seemingly endless to-do list. Choose from two widgets designed to put your favorite Keep functionality on your Home screen, like a tappable to-do list that’s front and center on your Android device.

The Google Keep widgets offer quick actions and a dynamic to-do list.

Frames for your favorite Memories

The Google Photos Memories widget will be the first to use the new freeform widget frames in Material You, showing off your photos in fun and interesting shapes across your Android device.

Google Photos uses the unique Material You widget shapes.

Quick access to your files and photos

The Google Drive widget makes it easier to upload and search for files. And if you choose the larger widget, you can open suggested documents with just one tap.

Google Drive widgets give you quick access to your files and photos.

Non-stop listening

If you listen to tunes on YouTube Music, you can place tappable playback controls anywhere on your Home screen with the new widget. Plus, you can see what’s playing without opening the app.

YouTube Music widgets put playback controls on your Home screen.

Simple view of your data usage

For Google Fi phone plan customers, an updated widget will help you easily manage your monthly data usage. And just like the previous widget, the new one will alert you when you’ve used a specific amount of data, and allow you to set data limits for other plan members from the Fi app.

Track your data usage with the Google Fi widget.

Closer eye on the time

With new clock widgets, you can choose from four analog clock faces for your Home screen. Each clock face is a creative design with a ticking second hand. And if you need it, a new digital stopwatch widget will help keep you on track (and on time).

The analog clock widgets have ticking second hands.

Most of all, we’re excited to see how you’ll combine these new widgets to create a more helpful, personalized Android device that’s as unique as you are.

• An Android tablet with a light blue and gray wallpaper shows a collection of widgets organized in a unique way. Most of the screen is taken up with the Calendar widget, but the tablet screen also includes widgets for Google Drive, Gmail, Google Keep and Chrome.

• An Android tablet with a light green and yellow wallpaper shows a collection of widgets organized in a unique way. The widgets include Google Drive, Gmail, YouTube Music and Calendar.

• An Android tablet with a warm orange wallpaper shows a collection of widgets organized in a unique way. The widgets include Google Photos, Calendar, Maps and the analog clock.

by Luke Wroblewski via The Keyword