Official Google Canada Blog

See the light with Night Sight

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

professional photos

iPhone XS with SmartHDR (left), and Pixel 3 with Night Sight (right).
Why photography is difficult at night How Night Sight works

Night Sight can capture more light when Pixel and the scene are still. Photo by Narayan Hegde (Pixel 3, Night Sight).

Night Sight is robust to moderate levels of hand shake and scene motion. It merges many dark but sharp photos into one bright photo

Night Sight uses a neural network to balance colours.
How and when to use Night Sight

Hold the camera steady. If you can, try propping it against a stable surface.

If you’re taking a photo of someone, ask them to hold still for a few seconds before and after you press the shutter button.

Try tapping on a bright edge to help your camera focus when taking photos in very dark conditions.

Make sure the camera lens is clean. It can accumulate oil from fingerprints, creating blurry and soft photos.

Avoid pointing your camera at bright light sources, which may cause unwanted reflections in your photo.

shared albumPosted by Alexander Schiffhauer, Product Manager, Computational Photography

Making it easier to control your data, directly in Google products

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Today, we’re making it easier for you to make decisions about your data directly within the Google products you use every day, starting with Search. Without ever leaving Search, you can now review and delete your recent Search activity, get quick access to the most relevant privacy controls in your Google Account, and learn more about how Search works with your data.

Control your data, directly in the Google products you use every day When you use Google products, you generate data about your activity. For Search, this data includes the terms you search for, links you interact with and other information like your current location when you search.
Before today, if you were searching on Google and wanted to review or manage this data, the best way for you to do that would have been to visit your Google Account. Now, we’re bringing these controls to you – from directly within Search, you can review or delete your Search activity and quickly get back to finding what you were searching for.

We’re also providing quick access to the privacy controls in your Google Account that are most relevant as you use Search. For example, to control the ads you see when you search, we give you access to your Ad Settings. Additionally, you can access your Activity Controls to decide what information Google saves to your account and uses to make Search and other Google services faster, smarter and more useful.

If you want to learn more about what data is being generated as you use Google services and how we use data to improve your experience, you can now find a short video that helps explain this information.

We’re launching this improvement in Google Search on desktop and mobile web today, and in the Google app for iOS and Android in the coming weeks. Next year, we’ll expand this to Maps, followed by many other Google products. Having access to relevant and actionable privacy controls directly from the Google products you use every day is just one way that we are continuously working to build privacy that works for everyone.

Google Pixel 3. Make every day more extraordinary.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Pixel 3 and Pixel 3XL

Brilliant photos every time and super-charged selfies

Capture smiles, not blinks: A feature we call Top Shot uses AI to help you capture the perfect photo every time. When you take a motion photo, it captures alternate shots in HDR+, then recommends the best one—even if it’s not exactly when you hit the shutter, looking for those where everyone is smiling, with eyes open, and facing the camera. Top Shot automatically captures alternate shots in HDR+. If your timing wasn’t perfect, the camera will suggest a better one and give you the option to save it.

Get better zoom: When you zoom in on a phone camera, the image looks grainy. Super Res Zoom is a computational photography technique, traditionally used for astronomy and scientific imaging, that produces sharp details when you zoom.

No light; no problem: Pixel 3 lets you take natural-looking photos in dark surroundings, all without a flash. With Night Sight, coming soon to Pixel 3, you can take bright, detailed, colorful shots around the campfire, in a moonlit forest, or a selfie after you close out the bar.

No selfie stick required: Get everyone in the picture with Group Selfie, which gives you 184% more room in your photo for friends and scenery.

Look … no hands! Photobooth mode uses AI to recognize that when you’re smiling or making a funny expression, you’re ready for a selfie. It snaps the photo on its own so that you don’t need to reach for the shutter button—a good option for candids.

Even more stunning portraits, front and back: When you take photos in Portrait Mode, you can change the blurriness of the background, or change the part of the picture in focus, after the fact. Google Photos can also make the subject of your photo pop by leaving them in color, while changing the background to black and white.

Create and play: In Playground, you can make photos, selfies and videos come to life by adding your favorite superheroes, animated stickers and fun captions. In celebration of Marvel Studios’ 10 Year Anniversary, you’ll enjoy seeing the characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (exclusively on Pixel) react to each other and to you.

Super smooth video: When you want to capture something that won’t stop moving—think an adorable toddler or your new puppy—Motion Auto Focus will make sure your Pixel 3 camera stays in sharp focus automatically, as you record. And if you happen to be taking a selfie video while walking or moving around, Pixel 3 brings you front-facing video stabilization.

Unlimited storage for all of your photos and videos With Pixel 3, you can save all your favourite moments with free, unlimited photo and video storage in original resolution.1 It’s hassle-free, you don’t have to think about back-ups. Come back to Google Photos later and search for the beach photos you took on your Pixel 3, and they’ll pop right up.

Your AI-powered sidekick The AI in Pixel 3 enables new features that make your day-to-day actions simpler and easier.

If you want to know more about something you’re looking at, use Google Lens, built right into the Pixel 3 camera.2 To scan and translate text, find similar styles of clothing, or identify popular plants and animals, you can now long press in the Pixel 3 camera to easily open Lens. When you point your camera at information you want to remember or don’t feel like typing in—like a URL or QR code on a flyer or an email address on a business card—Google Lens suggests what to do next, like creating a new contact.

You can count on even more help across other apps too, including Gmail’s Smart Compose, now available for mobile on Pixel 3. Smart Compose suggests phrases in your emails so that you can draft them faster, on the go. Gboard, the keyboard built into your Pixel 3, will recommend GIFs, stickers, and more, to make your conversations fun and engaging. Both are available first in English.

Digital Wellbeing Our phones, while probably the most important tech in our lives, shouldn’t control our lives. So Digital Wellbeing, a suite of tools to help you find your own balance with technology, is built into Pixel 3. It includes a dashboard to help you understand how you spend time on your phone, the ability to set time limits on specific apps, and a new Wind Down mode to help you get to sleep at night by gently transitioning your display to a grayscale screen. When you don’t want to be bothered by rings or notifications, just flip to Shhh— an easy gesture that turns on Do Not Disturb and minimizes distractions.

Fast and wireless charging Pixel 3 comes with an 18 Watt fast charger in the box, which can give you up to 7 hours of use in 15 minutes of charging.3 With our AI-powered Adaptive Battery technique, Pixel 3 prioritizes battery power for your most important apps to make your phone last all day.

Alongside Pixel 3, we’re also introducing Pixel Stand, our new, Qi compliant wireless charger (sold separately). While charging in the Pixel Stand, your phone turns into a smart visual and audio experience powered by the Google Assistant. It answers your questions, plays music, helps you control smart home devices, transitions into a photo frame when idle, and much more. If you set an alarm, your screen will gently brighten over 15 minutes before your alarm goes off, mimicking the sunrise and helping you wake up naturally.

Pixel 3 is IP68 water and dust resistant and has a security chip custom-designed by Google called Titan M, making it the most secure phone we've built yet. Titan M enhances mobile security by protecting your unlock credentials, disk encryption, app data, and the integrity of the operating system code itself. Powered by Android 9 Pie, Pixel 3 comes with the latest Android operating system.

You can choose from two sizes - the 5.5” Pixel 3 and the 6.3” Pixel 3 XL - and three colours - Just Black, Clearly White, and Not Pink. Both have the exact same feature set and include high quality Pixel USB-C earbuds and a USB-C Digital to 3.5 mm headphone adapter in the box. Pixel 3 comes with dual front-firing speakers tuned by a GRAMMY-winning music producer to turn your phone into a powerful speaker. Customers who activate a Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL by December 31, 2018 can get 6-months of free YouTube Music Premium.

Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL will be available for pre-order on the Google Store starting today and for sale at Best Buy, Bell, Costco, Fido, Freedom, Koodo, Rogers, Telus, T-Booth, Videotron, Virgin Mobile, WirelessWave, Walmart, WoW Mobile in the coming weeks. The Pixel 5.5” 64GB will start at $999 (plus tax) and the Pixel 6.3” 64GB will start at $1129 (plus tax). The Pixel Stand will be available in November via the Google Store and select retail and carrier partners for $109 (plus tax).
1. Free, unlimited online original-quality storage for photos / videos uploaded from Pixel 3 to Google Photos through 1/31/2022, and those photos / videos will remain free at original quality. g.co/help/photostorage 2. For available Google Lens languages go to g.co/help/lens. Some Lens features require an internet connection. 3. Approximate battery life based on a mix of talk, data, standby, and use of other features, with always on display off and mobile hotspot off, according to a user profile as defined by Google. An active display or data usage will decrease battery life. Charging rates are based on use of the included charger. Charging time performance statistics are approximate. Actual results may vary.
Posted by Mario Queiroz, GM & VP, Pixel

Google Pixel Slate: Perfect for Work and Play

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

PixelbookGoogle Pixel Slate
Google Pixel Slate is designed to entertain and help you do more in a fresh, mobile form. We combined a touch-first user interface, optimized Android apps and powerful desktop-style features in Chrome OS to deliver a truly no-compromise device.
Versatile hardware design

Reimagining Chrome OS for a touch screenPixel Slate Keyboard and Pixelbook Pen

**This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the FCC, Industry Canada or CE. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained. Matt Vokoun, Director, Product Management, Hardware, Google

Twenty years of building for everyone

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Editor’s note: This blog is cross-posted from The Keyword

Twenty years ago, Google started with an ambitious goal to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. At the heart, we want to build technology that helps as many people as possible, regardless of who you are or where you are in the world. As we celebrate our birthday this month, we’re reflecting on some of the progress we’ve made toward that end. The wFinding answers … and making connectionshow to help my communityhow to find homesmall questionsRio’s favelasone’s own memories bilingualmake new friends Saving valuable time (and space!)
6. With the typing time reduced by Autocomplete in Search, we estimate people worldwide collectively save over 200 years of typing time per day!
7. Gmail’s Smart Compose, a new machine learning-powered experience that helps you write email faster, saves people from typing over 1 billion characters a week (to put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of nearly 4 million tweets).

Helping you stay safe online
8. One billion people visit the Google Account each year to access settings to safeguard their data and privacy.
9. Safe Browsing protects more than 3 billion devices from malware and phishing schemes, helping you browse the web with confidence.
10. And Gmail blocks nearly 10 million spam and malicious emails every minute, helping you keep your email and data safe.

Giving people tools and platforms to grow

11. Each year for the past five years, our search and advertising tools have helped provide more than $100 billion in economic activity to businesses, publishers and nonprofits across the United States. And we’re inspired by the stories of local and small businesses, from John’s Crazy Socks to American Hats, who are using the web to grow.
12. Google Play has helped developers grow app businesses and reach users in 190+ countries and across more than 2 billion Android devices. From an app that helps blind people see to a game that creates art, these creators are doing amazing things on our open platforms.
13. Since the start of 2017, we’ve trained more than 30 million people around the world in a range of digital skills, helping them start and grow businesses, learn to code, and find new careers.

Expanding access to learning opportunities
14. More than 25 million students worldwide are using Chromebooks in schools to share ideas, create projects, go on virtual field trips, and learn from each other and their teachers.
15. Art lovers and history buffs have marveled at artifacts from 1,500+ museums across 70 countries in Google Arts & Culture. From Abramovic to Zhengming, that’s thousands of artworks and 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents at your fingertips. And people have met more than 78 million selfie matches from 650+ institutions with Art Selfie.
16. People can access local versions of YouTube in 91 countries around the world across 80 languages—covering 95 percent of all internet traffic. And every day, people watch learning-related content over a billion times on YouTube.

Making an impact on a global scale 17. To help people in times of need, we’ve activated SOS Alerts to provide better access to emergency information in more than 200 crisis situations, and people have viewed Public Alerts—for things like storm warnings or hurricane evacuations—more than 1.5 billion times.
18. Since 2005, we’ve donated more than $1.5 billion to organizations working to help refugees and disaster victims, fight for equal justice, provide teachers with classroom equipment, and teach people new skills. And over the past four years Googlers have logged over a million hours (that’s 114 years’ worth!) volunteering in the communities where we live and work.
19. People have used Nest thermostats to save 25 billion kWh of energy—roughly enough to power Ireland for a year.
20. Thousands of developers have used TensorFlow, our open source tool for deep learning, to make farming more efficient in Japan and the Netherlands, predict wildfires and prevent deforestation, track whale migration and identify birdsong—and even detect cancer.
Google’s name is based on a number—a one with 100 zeroes after it. When we went public in 2004, the offering contained a math joke about the irrational number "e." Oh, and we call our campus headquarters the “Googleplex,” which, if it were spelled differently, would be a one followed by a googol of zeroes. You could say we’re numbers people.
But these numbers are different. They represent something incredibly meaningful—the billions of people who have posed a question, sent an email, opened a new tab, dragged a pin on a map, asked a big question. Billions of people who have found answers, gotten things done or started on a new adventure. Billions of people whose lives have gotten, just possibly, a little bit better or brighter thanks to something that we built.
Everything we’ve done for the past 20 years has been built with you in mind, and we’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity you’ve given us to be a part of your lives. And two decades in, we’re even more dedicated to building products and services that make a difference for you.

Posted by Emily Wood, Editor-in-Chief, The Keyword

Improving Search for the next 20 years

Monday, September 24, 2018

The Keyword

The British Council Library in my hometown

First and foremost, we focus on the user. Whether you’re looking for recipes, studying for an exam, or finding information on where to vote, we’re focused on serving your information needs.

We strive to give you the most relevant, highest quality information as quickly as possible. This was true when Google started with the Page Rank algorithm—the foundational technology to Search. And it’s just as true today.

We see billions of queries every day, and 15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before. Given this scale, the only way to provide Search effectively is through an algorithmic approach. This helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow.

Finally, we rigorously test every change we make. A key part of this testing is the rater guidelines which define our goals in search, and which are publicly available for anyone to see. Every change to Search is evaluated by experimentation and by raters using these guidelines. Last year alone, we ran more than 200,000 experiments that resulted in 2,400+ changes to search. Search will serve you better today than it did yesterday, and even better tomorrow.

The shift from answers to journeys: To help you resume tasks where you left off and learn new interests and hobbies, we’re bringing new features to Search that help you with ongoing information needs.

The shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get to information: We can surface relevant information related to your interests, even when you don’t have a specific query in mind.

And the shift from text to a more visual way of finding information: We’re bringing more visual content to Search and completely redesigning Google Images to help you find information more easily.

soap opera effectpredicting areas that might be affected in a flood
Posted by Ben Gomes, VP, Search, News and Assistant

Grow with Google provides opportunity for all Canadians

Monday, September 17, 2018

Economic Impact ReportGrow with GoogleCanada Learning CodeApplied Digital Skills ProgramIT Support Professional Certificateg.co/GrowCanadaPeace by Chocolate

Official Canada Blog

See the light with Night Sight

Making it easier to control your data, directly in Google products

Google Pixel 3. Make every day more extraordinary.

Google Pixel Slate: Perfect for Work and Play

Twenty years of building for everyone

Improving Search for the next 20 years

Grow with Google provides opportunity for all Canadians

Labels

Archive

Feed

Company-wide

Products

Developers