Google Maps is getting a privacy update that gives users new ways to control their information on the platform.
First, the app will begin collecting your recent activity into one central location where you can view places you’ve been to in the past, the date you went there, and the amount of time you spent visiting. You’ll be even able to “delete your searches, directions… and shares” in the same hub.
Looking at Google’s announcement, it appears you can delete each entry one by one or the whole thing altogether. A window will pop up on the screen letting you know what’s going to be thrown out. The data packet will include photos, reviews, feedback reports, saved lists, and more you’ve made about a location.
Tapping the blue dot on Google Maps will now bring up a settings menu for the Timeline and Location History features where you can see if either tool has been turned on as well as if the app has access to your device’s location. Timeline, if you’re not super familiar with it, uses data obtained from Location History to keep a record of all the places you’ve been to.
The deletion tool and the blue dot menu will start rolling out to Android and iOS phones over the coming weeks.
Saving the timeline
There is another update; however, it won’t come out until sometime next year. The upcoming feature allows people to save their Timeline recording directly onto their device instead of leaving it up on Google’s cloud. You are, of course, able to delete a part or all of your information at once, if you don’t want to leave a trace behind. Conversely, users can back up their data to the company servers at any time. Everything is encrypted, so no one, not even Google, can take a peek.
Location History is getting a small tweak. Its auto-delete function “will be set to three months by default” rather than 18 months as is currently the case. After that time passes, all saved information will be deleted. If you want to go back to the longer period, you can adjust at any time.
It’s unknown exactly when the Timeline changes will roll out to Android or iOS in 2024, although Google states you will receive an account notification when it eventually arrives.
Google Maps is full of neat little tricks that most people are unaware of. If you want to know what they are, check out TechRadar's list of the 10 things you didn't know Google Maps could do.
Google will be pulling the plug on the last vestiges of Play Movies & TV, and to help with the transition, it’ll be moving users’ purchased content to other services.
The tech giant has been slowly shutting down the platform for the past two years beginning with its removal from various smart TVs. The storefront has since existed on Android TV devices and Google Play undisturbed until recently when a post on the Android TV Help website announced the changes. According to the page, the update will roll out over the coming weeks, but the day you’ll receive the patch depends on what country you live in. Then on January 17, Google will officially move everything you bought on or are currently renting from Play Movies & TV to its new home. Something you should know is access to your content depends on what hardware you own.
For example, if you have an Android TV or streaming device, you can find your purchases over “in the Your Library row on the Shop tab.” People who own a cable or set-top box “powered by Android TV” will have to open the YouTube app and then go to the Movies & TV section. Media will be under the Purchased tab. On web browsers, it’s the same process: head over to YouTube and hop on over to Movies & TV on your account.
Also, the post from earlier mentions you can view content on the Google TV mobile app. It doesn’t say exactly where people can find their media, but if we have to take a wild stab in the dark, it’ll most likely be under Your Stuff.
A small limitation
There aren’t a lot of restrictions. One we found is the fact that the ability to buy or rent movies on YouTube isn’t available around the globe. It's only in a few regions. A full list of supporting countries can be found on Google’s Help website. It’s worth mentioning some online reports claim they’ve already received the patch as they’re “already seeing old movie buys” on YouTube so the release may be happening sooner than expected.
We reached out to Google asking for some clarification on the rollout, like are certain countries being prioritized first? Additionally, what if someone gets the update earlier than January 17? Does this mean they'll be locked out of their purchases until then? We’ll let you know what the company says if they respond.
Be sure to check out TechRadar's list of the best Android box of 2023 if you're looking for a way to upgrade your TV.
Google is reportedly developing an AI assistant that will analyze personal photos, files, as well as Search results with the goal of telling “your life story”.
This news comes from CNBC which saw documents revealing that the tech giant recently held an “internal summit” where company execs and employees presented Project Ellman. According to the piece, the AI will offer a “bird’s–eye view” of someone’s life by grabbing files from your Google Account, and utilizing written biographies and adjacent content to understand context. This process includes sifting through the information files to pinpoint important moments. The Google employees claimed Project Ellman could deduce the day a user was born, who their parents are, and if they have any siblings.
It doesn’t stop there because apparently, it's able to highlight chapters in your life like the years you spent at college or living in a certain city. Ellman can even learn your eating habits. If, for example, you upload a bunch of photos of pizza and pasta, the AI can infer that perhaps you’re a big fan of Italian food. The tech isn’t restricted to one person either as it can identify friends and family, plus social events you’ve been to.
Based on the report’s description alone, Project Ellman sounds very reminiscent of Memories on Google Photos, although on a much wider scale.
Personal chatbot
CNBC states the presentation continued with demonstrating Ellman Chat, which was described as ChatGPT, but with the ability to “answer previously impossible questions”. Judging by the examples given, the questions aren’t necessarily impossible; just tricky especially if you're a forgetful person. For instance, you can ask the chatbot the last time your brother visited or for suggestions on a location you can move to based on the pictures you upload.
Then we get to what may be one of Project Ellman’s secret purposes. By analyzing the screenshots users upload, the tech can make all sorts of predictions – from products you might buy, what interests you may have, plus future travel plans. The presenters also pitched the idea that it can learn what websites you frequent.
Project Ellman may know you better than you know yourself.
Analysis: All about you
We don’t think we have to tell you just how creepy all this sounds. We’re talking about an AI diving deep into your files, scrounging for every bit of data it can grab. Where is all that information going?
Gemini, Google's new large language model (LLM) is implied to be the model that’ll power Project Ellman because it’s multimodal, or in other words, it can accept multiple forms of inputs besides text. Generative AIs need a constant stream of content to stay up to date. It seems like Google might be pole-vaulting over privacy boundaries, seeking more data to feed Gemini and keep it growing.
Granted, there’s no guarantee Ellman will ever see the light of day. A Google spokesperson told CNBC this is all an “early internal exploration”. If there are plans for a release, developers will take the time to ensure it’s helpful to people while keeping user privacy at the forefront.
We urge you to take this statement with a grain of salt. Despite their supposed best efforts, the company has a storied history when it comes to privacy issues. The company gets into a lot of trouble for it. Just look at the Wikipedia page on the topic; it’s huge.
Hopefully, this is all overblown and the tech giant doesn’t launch a digital vacuum cleaner sucking up everything.
If you're looking for ways to start protecting your data, check out TechRadar's list of the best ad blockers for 2023.
Earlier this week, Google unveiled its new Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) model, and it’s safe to say the tool absolutely wowed the tech world. That was in part due to an impressive “hands on” video demo (below) that Google shared, yet it’s now emerged that all was not as it seemed.
According to Bloomberg, Google modified interactions with Gemini in numerous ways in order to create the demonstration. It raises questions over the chatbot’s abilities, as well as how much Google has been able to catch up with rival OpenAI and its own ChatGPT product.
For instance, the video’s YouTube description explains that “for the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity.” In other words, it probably takes a lot longer for Gemini to respond to queries than the demo suggested.
And even those queries have come under scrutiny. It turns out that the demo “wasn’t carried out in real time or in voice,” says the Bloomberg report. Instead, the real demo was constructed from “still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text.”
This means that Gemini wasn’t responding to real-world prompts quickly in real time – it was simply identifying what was being shown in still images. To portray it as a smooth, flowing conversation (as Google did) feels a little misleading.
A long way to go
That’s not all. Google claimed that Gemini could outdo the rival GPT-4 model in almost every test the two tools took. Yet looking at the numbers, Gemini is only ahead by a few percentage points in many benchmarks – despite GPT-4 being out for almost a year. That suggests Gemini has only just caught up to OpenAI’s product, and things might look very different next year or when GPT-5 ultimately comes out.
It doesn’t take much to find other signs of discontent with Gemini Pro, which is the version currently powering Google Bard. Users on X (formerly Twitter) have shown that it is prone to many of the familiar “hallucinations” that other chatbots have experienced. For instance, one user asked Gemini to tell them a six-letter word in French. Instead, Gemini confidently produced a five-letter word, somewhat confirming the rumors from before Gemini launched that Google’s AI struggled with non-English languages.
This all suggests that, for now, Gemini may fall short of the lofty expectations created by Google’s slick demo, and is a timely reminder not to trust everything you see in a demo video. It also implies that Google still has a long way to go to catch up with OpenAI, despite the enormous resources at the company’s disposal.
Some Google Drive users have recently been reporting that the service has been deleting months’ worth of files from their computers. If you’ve found yourself in that predicament, help could be at hand, as Google has just shared a few tips that might help get your files back.
It’s possible that even after trying Google’s methods, your files can’t be returned, so it isn't a guaranteed remedy. But Google says its fixes are for “desktop users on version 84 who experienced issues accessing local files that had yet to be synced to Drive,” so the solutions seem to be fairly limited in scope.
Judging by posts online, many users have lost files from months ago, which is potentially at odds with Google’s note that the fix is for files that hadn’t been synced to Drive. I myself have lost files due to this bug and regularly sync my Google Drive app. Still, it’s worth trying Google’s ideas if you are affected.
The first method requires you to download the latest version of Google Drive. Once that’s been installed, you’ll need to run Google’s recovery tool. To do so, open Drive for desktop and select the app’s icon in your system tray (Windows) or menu bar (macOS). Hold the Shift key and select the Settings (cog) button, then choose “Recover from backups.”
(Image credit: Future)
That’ll kick off the recovery process. You’ll get a message reading “Recovery has started” if there are files to recover, or “No backups found” if not. If there is a backup, you’ll see “Recovery is complete” and a new folder with your unsynced files will appear on your desktop.
You might also see a “Not enough disk space” message once the tool finishes. In this case, you can free up disk space and try again, or attempt the next method to recover the files to a different drive.
Choose a different drive
(Image credit: Future)
Running the recovery process on a different drive with more free space requires using the command line, which is a little more advanced. To do this, you’ll again need to download the latest version of Drive for desktop. After that, close the app and open a command prompt (Windows) or Terminal (macOS).
On Windows, run the following command, including the quotation marks: “C:\Program Files\Google\Drive File Stream\launch.bat” –recover_from_account_backups
On macOS, you’ll need to enter this, including the speech marks: “/Applications/Google Drive.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Drive” –recover_from_account_backups
You can use '–recover_output_path' in command line to specify where recovered files should be saved. The tool will run in the background in Windows and in the foreground in macOS. When complete, a folder called Google Drive Recovery will appear in your selected output location (the desktop by default) containing your recovered files.
Recover from a backup
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
There’s one other method to try if neither of the last two work for you, and this could help if you previously disconnected your account or removed the Google Drive cache from your machine.
However, the technique requires you to have either a Windows backup or a Time Machine backup in macOS. For the full instructions on this last solution, check out the 'Advanced troubleshooting options for data recovery' section in the Google Drive help page.
If after all of that you still can’t get your files back, you’ll need to let Google know by submitting feedback through the Google Drive app. Use the hashtag #DFD84 and tick the checkbox to include diagnostic logs.
A real pain
(Image credit: Getty Images)
This whole sorry saga has been a real pain for some Google Drive users – after all, the whole point of using the app is to keep your files safely synced, not to have them deleted.
I know this issue all too well, as I’ve lost files because of it. One minute they’re in their folder on my computer, the next they’ve been deleted. Sometimes I’ve been able to find them in my computer’s trash, and other times they’re in the trash online in Google Drive, but some files have simply disappeared without a trace.
With any luck, Google’s proposed fixes are able to put a stop to this problem, or at least help users get back files they thought had been deleted. But while this Drive update might help to restore your files after the fact, we don’t know if it will fix your documents being deleted in the first place. We’ll be looking out for a more permanent fix in the coming weeks.
Gemini comes in three different “sizes”; however, we’re only going to focus on the two more powerful versions, Pro and Ultra, because those directly impact Bard. The former, according to the company, can handle a wide variety of tasks. It’s the all-rounder that will be present on other Google platforms. It’s important to mention the company has fine-tuned Gemini Pro on Bard allowing the AI to be more capable at certain actions like understanding prompts, summarizing content, planning things out, and reasoning.
In a demonstration, the tech giant had scientific YouTuber Mark Rober try out the updated Bard. He asked the AI to come up with “the most accurate paper airplane” which then provided a bunch of different designs and optimizations. The video is supposed to show how Bard can now play a bigger role in the creative process.
Availability
Bard with Gemini Pro is available today in English across over 170 countries and territories. A full list of supporting nations can be found on Google’s Help website. At the time of this writing, you can only enter text prompts although there are plans to implement other “modalities” soon. Still, we don't know yet what those modalities will be. What’s more, Google intends to expand the AI’s reach to Europe (users on the continent currently don’t have access), plus grow its language support.
Early next year, Bard will see another upgrade where we’ll see Google install its Gemini Ultra model to the AI. This is the top-of-the-line version specifically designed to handle “highly complex tasks” and accept multimodal inputs such as text, video, and even code. Google explains Ultra will “think more carefully before answering” tough questions as it has better reasoning skills.
Right now, the company is doing some safety checks to make sure the upgrade is the best it can be. When it does come out, the new version will be called Bard Advanced.
It’s unknown exactly when the new Bard will launch, however, Google will soon release a tester program to a select group of users. We contacted Google to ask when and how people can join this tester program. This story will be updated at a later time.
Google has announced the new Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) model, an AI system that will power a host of the company’s products, from the Google Bard chatbot to its Pixel phones. The company calls Gemini “the most capable and general model we’ve ever built,” claiming it would make AI “more helpful for everyone.”
Gemini will come in three 'sizes': Ultra, Pro and Nano, with each one designed for different uses. All of them will be multimodal, meaning they’ll be able to handle a wide range of inputs, with Google saying that Gemini can take text, code, audio, images and video as prompts.
While Gemini Ultra is designed for extremely demanding use cases such as in data centers, Gemini Nano will fit in your smartphone, raising the prospect of the best Android smartphones gaining a significant AI advantage.
With all of this new power, Google insists that it conducted “rigorous testing” to identify and prevent harmful results arising from people’s use of Gemini. That was challenging, the company said, because the multimodal nature of Gemini means two seemingly innocuous inputs (such as text and an image) can be combined to create something offensive or dangerous.
Coming to all your services and devices
Google has been under pressure to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its advanced AI capabilities. Just a few days ago, in fact, news was circulating that Google had delayed its Gemini announcement until next year due to its apparent poor performance in a variety of languages.
Now, it turns out that news was either wrong or Google is pressing ahead despite Gemini’s rumored imperfections. On this point, it’s notable that Gemini will only work in English at first.
What does Gemini mean for you? Well, if you use a Pixel 8 Pro phone, Google says it can now run Gemini Nano, bringing all of its AI capabilities to your pocket. According to a Google blog post, Gemini is found in two new Pixel 8 Pro features: Smart Reply in Gboard, which suggests message replies to you, and Summarize in Recorder, which can sum up your recorded conversations and presentations.
The Google Bard chatbot has also been updated to run Gemini, which the company says is “the biggest upgrade to Bard since it launched.” As well as that, Google says that “Gemini will be available in more of our products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome and Duet AI” in the coming months, Google says.
As part of the announcement, Google revealed a slate of Gemini demonstrations. These show the AI guessing what a user was drawing, playing music to match a drawing, and more.
Gemini vs ChatGPT
(Image credit: Google)
It’s no secret that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the most dominant AI tool for months now, and Google wants to end that with Gemini. The company has made some pretty bold claims about its abilities, too.
For instance, Google says that Gemini Ultra’s performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results in “30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks” used in large language model (LLM) research and development. In other words, Google thinks it eclipses GPT-4 in nearly every way.
Compared to the GPT-4 LLM that powers ChatGPT, Gemini came out on top in seven out of eight text-based benchmarks, Google claims. As for multimodal tests, Gemini won in all 10 benchmarks, as per Google’s comparison.
Does this mean there’s a new AI champion? That remains to be seen, and we’ll have to wait for more real-world testing from independent users. Still, what is clear is that Google is taking the AI fight very seriously. The ball is very much in OpenAI’s (and Microsoft's) court now.
Google has delayed a series of top-secret artificial intelligence (AI) events that were set to showcase the company’s Gemini generative AI tool, according to The Information. If true, it's another blow to Google’s efforts to compete with the likes of ChatGPT in the AI world – although Gemini is still expected to launch soon.
As detailed in a paywalled report from The Information, the Gemini event was due to take place just days from now, with the first one kicking off next week. Yet Google CEO Sundar Pichai has apparently taken the decision to push it back to January 2024, according to “two people with knowledge of the of the decision.”
The reason for the delay? Google was not confident that Gemini was able to “reliably handle some non-English queries,” The Information claims. Google wants to ensure its AI tool works well in a number of languages, and it’s clearly not quite there yet.
The events – due to be held in California, New York and Washington – would apparently have been “Google’s most important product launch of the year” owing to how keen Google is to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That means that delaying them could be a sizable blow to Google, even if they do ultimately take place in early 2024.
In ChatGPT’s shadow
(Image credit: Solen Feyissa/Unsplash)
Despite their imminent dates, Google hadn’t done much promotion for the events (perhaps due to concerns over Gemini’s abilities). In the end, that meant the company managed to avoid an embarrassing retraction or cancellation of already-announced events.
Yet Google isn’t likely to be very happy with the situation. The delay demonstrates how much the company is struggling to get on level terms with OpenAI, despite its vast wealth and engineering abilities. It’s also the second time in recent weeks that Google has reportedly had to delay its Gemini events.
It comes shortly after OpenAI reportedly had a major breakthrough with its own generative AI efforts. This tool is supposedly able to solve problems it has not been trained on, something that AI has traditionally found difficult, thereby ramping up the pressure on Google to hit back.
Google is likely to weave Gemini’s AI capabilities into its other products, such as Search, Google Assistant, Google Docs and more, The Information believes, so keep an eye out for AI updates if you regularly use the company’s apps. Just don’t expect to see these changes until early next year.
To commemorate one billion monthly active users, Google is introducing several new customization options on its Messages app.
What’s particularly interesting about the update is that a few of the features are reminiscent of what you find on Apple’s own Messages app. For example, you have Photomoji, allowing you to clip specific parts in a photograph and use them as emoji reactions. iOS 17 has something similar called Stickers. In Google Messages, cutouts are “saved in a special tab for reuse”, plus other people in a group chat can use the same Photomojis at any time.
The similarities don’t stop there. Google Messages is adding Profiles that let users create an introductory biography about themselves alongside their name and a picture. Its iOS counterpart would be Contact Poster. In addition, the app will now have animated Screen Effects akin to the message animations on iPhone. Unlike iOS, you can’t activate the colorful displays whenever you want as Google’s rendition requires you to enter specific “prompt words”. The full list of prompts isn’t in the announcement, although it does mention two.
Typing in “I love you” will launch a bunch of hearts. Entering “it’s snowing” would presumably cause snowflakes to fall from the top. There wasn’t a demo showcasing the latter so we can’t say for sure.
Unique inclusions
Of course, the update isn’t only about copying Apple.
There are Voice Moods that’ll let you slap an emoji onto a voice recording, giving it extra visual flair. Additionally, Google states it’ll be “increasing the bitrate and sampling rate” on vocal messages to improve audio quality. Next, you can change the color scheme of a chat, namely the text bubbles and background, to whatever you want via Custom Bubbles. This can help you differentiate conversations so you don’t accidentally send the wrong text to your mom when it was meant for a friend.
(Image credit: Google)
The last two aren’t as impactful, but they can add some nice flourishes to a chat. Now when you react to a message with an emoji, a short animation called a Reaction Effect will play at the same time. Also, standalone emojis sent through the app will sport extra visual effects like sparkles.
Once you get the patch, you can try out most of these features so keep an eye out for when it eventually arrives. The two outliers are Voice Moods and Reaction Effects; both of which are currently in beta. To try those out, you’ll have to become a beta tester for Google Messages, according to the official support page.
Android update
Besides the Messages update, Google is adding new features to other Android platforms. A lot is being implemented so we’re only going to mention the more impactful additions.
Moving forward, smartwatches running Wear OS can now control more smart appliances like vacuums and groups of smart lights. The TalkBack tool is being given an AI voice that’ll read out text descriptions to help blind people understand the content in front of them. And finally, Live Caption on smartphones will be available in more languages.
2024 is about a month away, and to celebrate the end of the year, Google has named the winners of the Google Play’s Best of 2023 Awards.
For the sake of brevity, we're going to primarily focus on the best Androids apps as the company introduced a new categories for this year, such as Best with AI and Best Multi-device App. This caused the list to grow by a significant amount so we couldn’t include the likes of the best Chromebook or best tablet apps (If you’re curious to know, the winner of the best Chromebook app is FlipaClip, software that can help people create 2D animation, and the winner for best tablet app is Concepts, a vector-based drawing tool).
Google states the list on its blog is centered around the American winners. Other countries are said to have different winners. However, when we looked at other region, the entries matched the US list except for a single outlier which we’ll shout out later on.
Android Apps of the Year
1. Imprint: Learn Visually
(Image credit: Future)
Google has given the Best App of 2023 award to Imprint: Learn Visually, an education software that strives to teach you new skills and the world around you in bite-sized lessons. It offers a personalized experience where you can learn about topics that interest you from human history to psychology. And Imprint does this via eye-catching visual storytelling.
Spotify has earned the Best Multi-device App award for allowing music streaming across a variety of locations – be it in the kitchen, on the commute to hike, or out on the town. The company highlights the service’s ability to “remotely control playback on another device”. Plus, you can download your favorite songs for offline listening. What’s interesting, it's the only music streaming app on the whole list.
At the beginning of November, Google allowed people to come in to vote for what they believed was the best app of the year. Winning the Users’ Choice Award is ChatGPT, which isn’t surprising in our opinion. ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2023 as one of the premiere generative AI platforms and whose technology fuels Microsoft’s Bing Chat. On top of that, 2024 is shaping up to be a big year for it.
If you’re looking to make new friends or have recently moved to a different city, the company recommends installing Bumble For Friends (BFF for short) on your smartphone. It differs from the regular Bumble app as it doesn't focus on helping you find dates. Instead, BFF is all about helping you make genuine friendships, as the name suggests, with others in your local area
Voidpet Garden: Mental Health won the Best for Personal Growth award and it’s pretty unique. Its goal is to help you practice mindfulness and self care as a way to improve your mental health. It does this in a Pokemon-esque manner by having you collect Void Pets which are said to be creatures born from negative emotion. You raise these creatures by completing tasks in order to turn them into celestial-looking dragons with each representing a positive attribute about the user.
Artifact: Feed Your Curiosity is similar to Imprint: Learn Visually in that it’s an app that can teach users about the world, but it does so in a different way. The service functions like X’s (formerly known as Twitter) Explore page by offering a curated stream of news articles from across the internet. It covers a variety of topics like the tech industry, politics, and gaming. Users even have the option to mark certain stories as clickbait for better curation.
In the UK, the award went to ReciMe, a social platform where home cooks share their family recipes.
Aware is another mental health app like Voidpet Garden although it takes a more grounded approach towards mindfulness. It’s a type of journaling software housing “science-based exercises [alongside] live guided sessions”. You don’t have to create an account, plus it’s totally free. No subscription necessary.
It’s worth mentioning this has the least amount of downloads out of everything on this roundup although we do expect it to grow exponentially since it won the Best Hidden Gem award.
Despite winning the Users’ Choice award, ChatGPT was effectively snubbed by Google as it didn’t get the crown for Best AI. That honor went to Character AI, an app filled with personality-driven chat bots that you can talk to. For example, you can talk to Amelia Earhart, Julius Caesar, or Poseidon, God of the Ocean. People can even talk to Whiskers the Cat.
As you can probably guess, it’s not meant to be taken seriously. It aims to be a fun interactive experience – almost like a video game.
For families, Google has given the nod to PAW Patrol Academy, an app where young kids ages two to five can learn problem-solving skills, gain confidence, and get in touch with their creative side. It features characters from the popular animated series in a variety of interactive adventures as well as clips from certain episodes. What’s more is it doesn’t need to connect to Wi-Fi so kids can enjoy it on the go.
Rounding out the list of Google’s best Android apps for 2023 is AWorld in support of ActNow. Its purpose is to teach people how to counteract climate change by calculating their carbon footprint and learn how they can change their lifestyle to reduce the impact they may have on the environment. The software will recommend basic activities like planting trees to lessen carbon emissions or use natural products among other things. AWorld will also encourage you to join group challenges by completing a set number of environmentally-friendly actions.
1 844.742.7448 
Email Us
Remote Support 
Contact
