But don’t expect the EV maker to drop Android Auto or Apple CarPlay as a result.
GM, for instance, decided not to make the new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV compatible with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay.
Meanwhile, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is a secondary interface that lies on top of an operating system.
Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are apps that runs on the user’s phone and wirelessly communicates with the vehicle’s infotainment system.
Automakers have been scrambling to achieve the so-called “software-defined vehicle” and have largely used Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as a stop gap.
Google is set to build a new subsea cable connecting Chile with Australia, via French Polynesia — the first such cable to directly connect South America with Asia-Pacific.
While countless other submarine cables traverse the Pacific Ocean, they substantively connect Asia with North America, though some do snake down the Pacific coast from the U.S and Mexico to various landing points in the South of the continent.
Indeed, Google completed its first entirely private cable project four years ago with Curie, connecting California with Chile.
Google hasn’t given any indication as to when Humboldt will be complete, but rather than going it alone as it has done with other recent cable projects, the internet giant is partnering with Chile’s Desarrollo País and Office des postes et télécommunications de Polynésie française (OPT) to lay the 9,200 mile (14,800KM) cable.
Tech companies including Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have also invested in various internet infrastructure programs, and alongside Google the quartet are said to either own or lease around half of all subsea cabling bandwidth.
Google today announced that it’ll stop charging Google Cloud customers a fee to migrate their data to another cloud provider or on-premise datacenter, effective immediately.
Customers using Google Cloud services including BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner and Persistent Disk are eligible for free transfers out of Google Cloud — but must first apply for approval through a form.
Only once an approved customer’s data has been transferred out of Google Cloud and they’ve terminated their cloud written agreement will the data transfer fee will be waived (via a bill credit).
According to an IDC survey, 99% of cloud storage users have incurred egress fees averaging 6% of their cloud storage costs.
In 2018, Cloudflare launched the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of companies pledging to reduce or eliminate data egress fees.
Google is removing 17 “underutilized” features in Google Assistant to focus on “quality and reliability,” the company announced on Thursday.
The news comes as Google is laying off hundreds of employees in its Google Assistant, hardware and other divisions.
Setting or using media alarms, music alarms, or radio alarms on Google Assistant enabled devices.
You can use Google Assistant to search for recipes across the web and YouTube.
Using App Launcher in Google Assistant driving mode on Google Maps to read and send messages, make calls, and control media.
To coincide with the National Retailer Association’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new gen AI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations.
But the slew of announcements show, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is attempting to court gen AI customers.
(Google’s long offered Distributed Cloud Edge as a service, but it’s now targeting retailers more directly.)
My question after being pre-briefed on all this was, frankly, are retailers really clamoring for gen AI?
But considering some of the rocky rollouts of gen AI in retail recently (see: Amazon’s review summaries exaggerating negative feedback), I can’t say I’m convinced that the retail industry will rush to adopt gen AI en masse — from Google Cloud or any other provider.
The affected divisions include voice-activated Google Assistant as part of the knowledge and information product team restructuring; and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team that manages Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware.
Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
The report also mentioned that Google will now have one core hardware engineering team instead of separate teams working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.
Separately, the company has also let go of people working on the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.
Last year, Google had rolling layoffs in different teams including the Waze mapping service in June, its recruiting team in September, and its news division in October.
Google announced today at CES that it has collaborated with Samsung to combine their sharing solutions into a singular cross-Android solution under the Quick Share name.
The new offering grows the network of devices that users can share content with across the Android ecosystem, including Chromebooks.
Back in 2020, Google introduced Nearby Share to make it easy for users to share files across devices.
Samsung also has its own similar capability called Quick Share.
Google also announced that it is working with PC manufacturers like LG to expand Quick Share to Windows PCs as a pre-installed app.
Google announced Tuesday at CES 2024 a new feature for EV drivers that will track and display real-time battery information in Google Maps.
The new Android Auto feature will rollout today on Ford Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning.
Google built-in adds Chrome, Weather ChannelGoogle also added new trip planning capabilities, the Chrome browser and the Weather Channel app to Google built-in.
The company said that starting today drivers of vehicles with Google built-in can send the trip they’ve planned on their smartphone using Google Maps directly to their car.
Cars with Google built-in will also get, starting today, PBS KIDS and Crunchyroll and the Weather Channel app.
Some of the most important channels for news traffic — Google Search, social platforms like Facebook — changed how they focus on and surface news links, and that’s had an overall hit on traffic and ad sales.
And consumer tastes have changed, too, and it appears that the app is also struggling to attract and retain users.
Given the decline in downloads, Apptopia said a figure of 10 million active users today would now be “a stretch.”Another firm, Sensor Tower, added more insight, noting that SmartNews had, on average, roughly 1.7 million worldwide daily active users between Q1 2023 and Q3 2023.
Sensor Tower’s estimates indicate the SmartNews app has roughly 5 million worldwide monthly active users from Q1–Q3 2023, down an average of 30% year-over-year, per quarter, it said.
Sensor Tower also suggested that lapsed product iterations and feature launches likely contributed to falling consumer interest and interaction with the SmartNews app.
Google’s DeepMind Robotics researchers are one of a number of teams exploring the space’s potential.
The newly announced AutoRT is designed to harness large foundational models, to a number of different ends.
In a standard example given by the DeepMind team, the system begins by leveraging a Visual Language Model (VLM) for better situational awareness.
A large language model, meanwhile, suggests tasks that can be accomplished by the hardware, including its end effector.
LLMs are understood by many to be the key to unlocking robotics that effectively understand more natural language commands, reducing the need for hard-coding skills.
