Google has announced that big changes are coming to Google Drive, its cloud-based file storage platform. This latest series of tweaks to the popular cloud storage service come mainly in the form of a shiny new landing page, but there’s an extra treat in sort for iOS users.
The new homepage (aptly named the ‘Home’ view) will become the default landing page for every Drive user when it rolls out over the next couple of months – though you’ll be able to swap back to the old view if you prefer. In a blog post explaining the changes, Google says that Home will be “streamlined” compared to the standard My Drive landing page, designed to make it “easier and faster for you to find files that matter most”.
To that end, the Home screen will include personalized suggestions that use AI to learn which files and folders you access regularly (or documents that are tied to upcoming events in your Google calendar). It’ll also include new ‘search chips’ that make filtering your files easier, and will employ Google’s Material Design 3 guidelines for a (hopefully) more modern and user-friendly look.
That’s not all, folks
Google isn’t stopping there, either. A long-awaited Drive feature is finally coming to iPhone and iPad: the document scanner, which uses your device camera to take high-quality scans of physical documents which are then converted to PDFs, with the ability to scan multiple pictures in succession for producing multi-page documents.
The feature has been available for Drive users on Android for a while now, so it’s good to see that Google isn’t planning on leaving iPhone owners out in the cold. The document scanner (which was recently upgraded for Android Users) will also use machine learning to suggest names for your scanned documents, such as recognizing a receipt from a store and giving it an appropriate filename.
The scanner feature is rolling out to iOS and iPadOS users now, so if you’ve got an Apple device you can expect to have it soon if you don’t already. The updated Google Drive homepage will be arriving at a slower pace, with early access starting now and a wide release for personal users from January 15 next year.
I’m personally a little dubious about an AI-powered homepage for Drive – ‘suggested content’ in the software I use has rarely been useful in my experience, AI-assisted or not. But thankfully Google has already confirmed that users will get an instant pop-up asking if they’d like to swap their default view back to the old My Drive page, so it’s not like this change is being forced on us.
Google finally joined the AI race and launched a ChatGPT rival called Bard – an “experimental conversational AI service” earlier this year. Google Bard is an AI-powered chatbot that acts as a poet, a crude mathematician and a even decent conversationalist.
The chatbot is similar to ChatGPT in many ways. It's able to answer complex questions about the universe and give you a deep dive into a range of topics in a conversational, easygoing way. The bot, however, differs from its rival in one crucial respect: it's connected to the web for free, so – according to Google – it gives “fresh, high-quality responses”.
Google Bard is powered by PaLM 2. Like ChatGPT, it's a type of machine learning called a 'large language model' that's been trained on a vast dataset and is capable of understanding human language as it's written.
Who can access Google Bard?
Bard was announced in February 2023 and rolled out for early access the following month. Initially, a limited number of users in the UK and US were granted access from a waitlist. However, at Google I/O – an event where the tech giant dives into updates across its product lines – Bard was made open to the public.
It’s now available in more than 180 countries around the world, including the US and all member states of the European Union. As of July 2023, Bard works with more than 40 languages. You need a Google account to use it, but access to all of Bard’s features is entirely free. Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there is no paid tier.
(Image credit: Google)
Opening up chatbots for public testing brings great benefits that Google says it's “excited” about, but also risks that explain why the search giant has been so cautious to release Bard into the wild. The meteoric rise of ChatGPT has, though, seemingly forced its hand and expedited the public launch of Bard.
So what exactly will Google's Bard do for you and how will it compare with ChatGPT, which Microsoft appears to be building into its own search engine, Bing? Here's everything you need to know about it.
What is Google Bard?
Like ChatGPT, Bard is an experimental AI chatbot that's built on deep learning algorithms called 'large language models', in this case one called LaMDA.
To begin with, Bard was released on a “lightweight model version” of LaMDA. Google says this allowed it to scale the chatbot to more people, as this “much smaller model requires significantly less computing power”.
(Image credit: Google)
At I/O 2023, Google launched PaLM 2, its next-gen language model trained on a wider dataset spanning multiple languages. The model is faster and more efficient than LamDA, and comes in four sizes to suit the needs of different devices and functions.
Google is already training its next language model, Gemini, which we think is one of its most exciting projects of the next 25 years. Built to be multi-modal, Gemini is touted to deliver yet more advancements in the arena of generative chatbots, including features such as memory.
What can Google Bard do?
In short, Bard is a next-gen development of Google Search that could change the way we use search engines and look for information on the web.
Google says that Bard can be “an outlet for creativity” or “a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills”.
Unlike traditional Google Search, Bard draws on information from the web to help it answer more open-ended questions in impressive depth. For example, rather than standard questions like “how many keys does a piano have?”, Bard will be able to give lengthy answers to a more general query like “is the piano or guitar easier to learn”?
An example of the kind or prompt that Google’s Bard will give you an in-depth answer to. (Image credit: Google)
We initially found Bard to fall short in terms of features and performance compared to its competitors. But since its public deployment earlier this year, Google Bard’s toolkit has come on leaps and bounds.
It can generate code in more than 20 programming languages, help you solve text-based math equations and visualize information by generating charts, either from information you provide or tables it includes in its responses. It’s not foolproof, but it’s certainly a lot more versatile than it was at launch.
Further updates have introduced the ability to listen to Bard’s responses, change their tone using five options (simple, long, short, professional or casual), pin and rename conversations, and even share conversations via a public link. Like ChatGPT, Bard’s responses now appear in real-time, too, so you don’t have to wait for the complete answer to start reading it.
(Image credit: Google)
Improved citations are meant to address the issue of misinformation and plagiarism. Bard will annotate a line of code or text that needs a citation, then underline the cited part and link to the source material. You can also easily double-check its answers by hitting the ‘Google It’ shortcut.
It works with images as well: you can upload pictures with Google Lens and see Google Search image results in Bard’s responses.
Bard has also been integrated into a range of Google apps and services, allowing you deploy its abilities without leaving what you’re working on. It can work directly with English text in Gmail, Docs and Drive, for example, allowing you to summarize your writing in situ.
Similarly, it can interact with info from the likes of Maps and even YouTube. As of November, Bard now has the limited ability to understand the contents of certain YouTube videos, making it quicker and easier for you to extract the information you need.
What will Google Bard do in future?
A huge new feature coming soon is the ability for Google Bard to create generative images from text. This feature, a collaborative effort between Google and Adobe, will be brought forward by the Content Authenticity Initiative, an open-source Content Credentials technology that will bring transparency to images that are generated through this integration.
The whole project is made possible by Adobe Firefly, a family of creative generative AI models that will make use of Bard's conversational AI service to power text-to-image capabilities. Users can then take these AI-generated images and further edit them in Adobe Express.
Otherwise, expect to see Bard support more languages and integrations with greater accuracy and efficiency, as Google continues to train its ability to generate responses.
Google Bard vs ChatGPT: what’s the difference?
Fundamentally the chatbot is based on similar technology to ChatGPT, with even more tools and features coming that will close the gap between Google Bard and ChatGPT.
Both Bard and ChatGPT are chatbots that are built on 'large language models', which are machine learning algorithms that have a wide range of talents including text generation, translation, and answering prompts based on the vast datasets that they've been trained on.
(Image credit: OpenAI)
The two chatbots, or “experimental conversational AI service” as Google calls Bard, are also fine-tuned using human interactions to guide them towards desirable responses.
One difference between the two, though, is that the free version of ChatGPT isn't connected to the internet – unless you use a third-party plugin. That means it has a very limited knowledge of facts or events after January 2022.
If you want ChatGPT to search the web for answers in real time, you currently need to join the waitlist for ChatGPT Plus, a paid tier which costs $ 20 a month. Besides the more advanced GPT-4 model, subscribers can use Browse with Bing. OpenAI has said that all users will get access “soon”, but hasn't indicated a specific date.
Bard, on the other hand, is free to use and features web connectivity as standard. As well as the product integrations mentioned above, Google is also working on Search Generative Experience, which builds Bard directly into Google Search.
Does Google Bard only do text answers?
Until recently Google's Bard initially only answered text prompts with its own written replies, similar to ChatGPT. But one of the biggest changes to Bard is its multimodal functionality. This allows the chatbot to answer user prompts and questions with both text and images.
Users can also do the same, with Bard able to work with Google Lens to have images uploaded into Bard and Bard responding in text. Multimodal functionality is a feature that was hinted at for both GPT-4 and Bing Chat, and now Google Bard users can actually use it. And of course, we also have Google Bard's Adobe-powered AI image generator, which will be powered by Adobe Firefly.
If you're the sort of person who likes to keep their Android phone or tablet running for several years, you might want to take note that Google Calendar could be dropping support for devices that aren't running Android 8 or newer.
The team at TheSpAndroid (via Android Police) has spotted code and an image in the latest release of Google Calendar for Android, which tells the user that “your current Android version is no longer supported”.
There's a flag labeled “UnsupportedOperatingSystem__enabled”, and the app is now marked as only supporting Android 8 (Oreo) and newer. For now though, it doesn't seem as though the switch has been hit that will disqualify older devices.
When that happens, you'll see a message on screen if you try and run the Google Calendar app on something older than Android 8, telling you to upgrade. Presumably Google Calendar will still be available via a mobile web browser on these phones and tablets.
The end is nigh
To be fair to Google, Android 8 was launched all the way back in August 2017. There aren't going to be a huge number of devices still running Android 7 (or Nougat) that can't be updated to Android 8, with the final Android 7.1.2 update pushed out in April 2017.
According to StatCounter, 2.12% of Android devices worldwide are running Android 7 or Android 7.1, with another 3.42% of devices on anything older than that – so we're looking at about 1 in 20 phones and tablets overall. The newest version, Android 14, started to roll out in October 2023.
Some of those older devices will be eligible for upgrades to newer Android versions, but if you have one that doesn't, it might be time to think about investing in a new gadget – at least if you want to carry on using Google Calendar.
Besides offering an improved set of features, newer versions of Android also give you better security, which is probably Google's main motivation here. According to TheSpAndroid, Google Calendar on Android currently supports devices running Android 5 (Lollipop), launched in June 2014.
Google has bolstered the powers of Bard AI regarding YouTube videos, with the AI now capable of tapping into a better level of understanding such content.
Google posted about the latest update for Bard and how these are the ‘first steps’ in allowing the AI to understand YouTube videos, and pull out relevant info from a clip as requested.
The example given is that you’re hunting out a YouTube explainer on how to bake a certain cake, and you can ask Bard how many eggs are required for the recipe in the video that pops up.
Bard is capable of taking in the whole video and summarizing it, or you can ask the AI specific questions as mentioned, with the new feature enabling the user to have ‘richer conversations’ with Bard on any given clip.
Another recent update for Bard improved its maths powers, specifically for equations and helping you solve tricky ones – complete with straightforward step-by-step explanations (just in English to begin with). Those equations can be typed in or supplied to Bard via an uploaded image.
Analysis: YouTube viewing companion
These are some useful new abilities, particularly the addition for YouTube, which builds on Google’s existing extensions for Bard that hook up to the company’s services including the video platform.
It’s going to be pretty handy to have Bard instantly pull up relevant details such as the mentioned quantities for recipes. Or indeed specifics you can’t recall when having just watched a video, to save you having to rewind back through to try and find those details.
The maths and equation-related skills are going to be a boon, too. The broad idea here is not just to show a solution, but teach how that solution was arrived at, thus equipping you to deal with other similar problems down the line.
Windows Central noticed that Microsoft penned a blog post about the generative AI captions which have been introduced to Bing search.
Normally, when you search for something on Bing, Microsoft’s engine returns results accompanied by a small snippet of text pulled from the page based on relevant key words.
Generative AI captions are different in that they offer a more context-based summary tailored to your search query.
Microsoft explains: “By analyzing a search query, [generative AI] extracts the most pertinent insights from web pages, and skillfully transforms them into highly relevant and easily digestible snippets.”
Every search query will prompt Bing to return a different snippet with the result, so even searching on the same topic, but with changed wording for the query, will mean generative AI (if it’s involved, of course) returning a different summary.
Analysis: A revolution in web search?
For those wary of having their website dealt with in this way, Microsoft further notes that while the generative AI-powered captions “may not mirror the exact wording on the webpage,” Bing employs a whole load of signals to ensure a precise and high-quality summary.
Those who remain unconvinced can opt their website out of generative AI captions if they wish.
Microsoft believes this initiative will “revolutionize the way people explore the web,” so the company is talking a pretty big game on this one.
It’s still early stages for the feature, of course, and a lot will depend on whether that promise of high-quality summaries is consistently realized.
Google isn’t standing still in this area, mind you, and already instigated its own program bringing generative AI to search, highlighting the key points of a web page in a similar vein (and more besides). This has been in testing throughout this year (since May), with it being rolled out much more broadly earlier this month.
Thus far, the addition of the Bing chatbot hasn’t helped drive traffic to Bing search, as Microsoft hoped – but perhaps generative AI will have more success in this respect. It’s a hugely uphill struggle against the might of Google, though, which has effectively become a verb meaning to search the web.
Google is updating its search engine with new tools to help you personalize the experience by making it tailored specifically to you.
Among the three reveals, the most impressive, in our opinion, has to be the upcoming Notes feature. This tool will pull together different “tips and advice” on a topic from across the internet if a search result isn't particularly helpful. In a demonstration shown to us, a Google rep played the role of someone looking up instructions on how to make frosting for a birthday cake. Let's say the first search result wasn't what you were looking for.
Selecting the Notes button below that result connects you to content uploaded by other people offering unique insight to your query. By giving users the opportunity to learn from other people's experiences, Google explained, you might find information better suited to your needs that an official source may fail to address. On the surface, it feels like the tech giant is launching a mini-social media platform on Search since the feature allows for a free-flowing exchange of information.
(Image credit: Google)
Be aware that Notes is a type of short-form content. There doesn’t appear to be enough room for long pieces of text. You won't be able to write, for instance, a 500-word recipe for frosting. These Notes need to be short and sweet. It's all about having people provide bite-sized tips on how to make something better such as suggesting adding a bit of lemon zest to a batch of frosting.
Guardrails and limitations
Google is aware that implementing such an update could expose Google Search to a bunch of bad actors coming in and uploading a bunch of inappropriate content. To combat this, it’s adding several guardrails. First, Google will be “using a combination of algorithmic protections and human review” to double-check what is uploaded. Second, the content in “each Note is ranked” according to a search result. The more relevant it is, the higher it’ll place. Finally, “anyone can report a note… for human review” if they run into any inappropriate content.
There are several limitations you need to be aware of. The search feature launches today, however, it will only be made available to users living in the US or India, plus they must be a part of the Search Labs program. Additionally, it will be exclusive to the mobile web version of Google Search as well as the official Google app.
If you want to try this out, we have a guide teaching people how to try out Google software betas. The guide describes gaining access to the Search Engine Experience, but it's the same process.
Notes will start as an “experiment”. The company wants to see how well this feature will work on a grand scale. It’s unknown how long the trial will last or if it'll see an official release.
Follow your favs
The rest of the update isn’t as dynamic, but it’s still interesting. Over the coming weeks, Google will introduce a Follow tool to American users on mobile. It’ll help you stay up to date on topics you frequently look up by providing “new-to-you” information. Follow can deliver news articles on the latest events of your favorite sports team or specific fashion trends.
In the image below, you'll see how Follow changes. The left screenshot displays a fairly generic feed with a few pictures, but over time, Google will deliver videos from content creators specializing in your interest once it learns what you like.
(Image credit: Google)
Finally, the Perspectives tab will roll out to Google Search on desktop to, as you can probably guess, people living in the United States. This tool lets you find content from various online communities like forums or social media platforms. Prior to this, it was exclusive to mobile devices.
As you can see, the US is getting the lion's share of this update. We asked a Google rep if there are plans for an international launch. All we were told is that they working on bringing the “features to locations”, but have nothing more to share at the moment.
We can see these tools becoming really useful helping you track great deals for tech during the holiday season. If you want our advice, check out TechRadar's list of the nine Black Friday deals we recommend buying now.
With the holiday season just over the horizon, Google Maps is receiving an update to make planning and traveling around these hectic times more manageable.
The patch consists of three new features. First, the app will gain updated “transit directions” that’ll tell you “the best route to your destination based on key factors”. This includes the overall length of the trip, estimated time of arrival, plus the number of transfers you’ll have to take in order to get there. It’ll even be possible to customize the route using filters telling Google Maps to focus on a specific type of transit, like subways, or if you want one with minimal walking.
Additionally, the app will tell where you can find the entrances and exits to stations “in over 80 cities around the world,” including Boston, London, New York City, Sydney, and Toronto. It'll point out “what side of the street they're on” as well as if there is a “clear walking route”.
Newfound collaboration
Next, the collaborative list tool will allow invited users to vote on an activity via emoji reactions. You can choose between a heart, a smiley face, a flame, or a flying stack of cash if you’re interested in going. For those who aren’t, a thumbs-down icon will be available.
Speaking of which, people can also react to publicly posted photographs on Google Maps with an emoji. The company states that “in some cases” you’ll be given the opportunity to use mashup reactions via Emoji Kitchen. The emoji mashup selections seem to depend on what the app’s AI sees in an image. For example, if it detects a bagel, the mashup will include the food item, and potentially, the yummy face. These custom-made icons will automatically be generated.
Everything you see here will be rolling out globally to Android and iOS devices starting today. The rest of the announcement consists of the tech giant shouting out certain Google Maps tools that you can use to help “navigate the holidays” like finding nearby charging stations for electric vehicles or purchasing train tickets right on the app.
Bad news for WhatsApp users on Android: chat log and media backups will soon count toward your Google Account storage limit.
This includes the free 15GB of storage given to people whenever they create a new Google Account. That amount is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos with the update further restricting on what can be saved. This move is a complete reversal of a 2018 decision where backups didn’t count toward the limit. It was all on the house.
Google explains on its Android Help website that it’s enacting this change so the “WhatsApp backup experience… will be in line with how it works on other platforms, with the added benefit of” having the free 15GB. The tech giant takes the time to point out this is “three times more than most mobile platforms” which appears to be a random potshot at iCloud’s more confining 5GB of storage.
The new rules
WhatsApp’s own post on its help website describes in detail how the update will roll out. It’ll affect WhatsApp Beta users first starting in December 2023. After that, the changes will periodically expand to all Android users throughout the first half of 2024. The platform states it’ll erect a banner in the Chat Backup section of the app’s Settings menu 30 days before it goes live on your phone.
Once you’ve reached the storage limit, you will need to start deleting files on your account in order to resume backups. You do have the option to purchase more storage via Google One. Prices normally start at $ 2 for the 100GB plan; however, at the time of this writing, monthly subscriptions have been reduced to $ 0.50 for the first three months. WhatsApp also recommends using their Chat Transfer tool to move chats between phones.
It’s important to mention this only affects personal Google Accounts. “If you have a Google Workspace subscription through work or school,” nothing changes for you. Restrictions won’t be implemented.
Feeling the squeeze
We should mention the move isn’t totally coming out of nowhere.
Hints of this decision first appeared all the way back in early 2022 when news site WABetaInfo discovered code in a WhatsApp beta revealing the cut off. We theorized the limitations were due to the sheer size of some chats as well as the “quantity of multimedia content people share” on the platform. All that data may have been putting a squeeze on Google servers “costing [the company] a significant sum.”
It appears all the recent WhatsApp updates have exacerbated this issue. We reached out to Google asking if it would like to make a statement. A company representative told us one of the main reasons why the two are making this change is “that over the years, more people have joined WhatsApp, sharing more high-res images and videos than ever before.”
During this past summer, the platform gave people the ability to share high definition photographs and videos. Perhaps the large file sizes proved to be too much for Google to handle, forcing the company to implement some sort of limitation on the platform.
Google Photos is introducing a pair of AI-powered features to help you organize all the family pictures and screenshots in your messy profile.
Moving forward, the service will be able to identify photographs “that were taken close together” and then group them together into what Google calls Photo Stacks. It appears the AI operates by selecting images that have visual similarities to each other. The software is not going to pick out pictures with a different composition or subjects in them. Once the selections have been made, Google Photos will choose one of them to be the lead image. Of course, you do have the option to manually pick the lead, “modify the stacks, or turn off” the feature entirely.
Say goodbye to endless scrolling and 👋 hello to a clean, decluttered gallery with new features in Google Photos.Enable Photo Stacks to automatically group similar photos for a tidier gallery experience. pic.twitter.com/a6FQBQJpAuNovember 15, 2023
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Tidying-up screenshots
Google Photos will be doing something similar for “screenshots and documents in your gallery” by automatically categorizing them “into more helpful albums”. There will be an album for images of your ID card, and receipts, plus one for “event information” like an upcoming concert or festival. The goal here is to make it easier to locate “what you need when you need it without having” to dig through a mess of photographs.
The AI will also allow you to set reminders on your phone calendar using the information from a screenshot of a ticket or “flyer for an upcoming event.” As an example, let’s say you took a screenshot of a ticket for a concert scheduled for December 2. You will see a “Set Reminder” option at the bottom of the picture in Google Photos. Tapping it causes a calendar entry to show up where you can enter more information or edit it. The company explains you can choose to “automatically archive your screenshots… after 30 days” which will hide them from the main gallery. They can still, however, be found in their respective albums.
Google Photos will also automatically identify and sort screenshots and documents into more helpful albums like ID, receipts and event information, so you can find them fast when needed. Got an important deadline? Quickly set a reminder for peace of mind. pic.twitter.com/0y13sFlNf5November 15, 2023
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The announcement states the Google Photos update is currently rolling out to Android and iOS. Be sure to keep an eye out for the patch when it arrives. No word if there will be a desktop version, although we did ask Google for more information. This story will be updated if we hear back.
Google Maps has had a rejig of the colors used to denote different elements, and a significant portion of its regular users aren't happy about the change.
As you may have seen, this change in color palette was first spotted back in September, but now it’s widely rolling out to users of Google’s navigation app.
Google Maps now has gray roads like Apple, rather than white or yellow roads as before, and forests are a darker green. On the other hand, the shade of blue used for water is lighter.
However, the active route is a much darker blue, with alternate routes shown in lighter blue (these used to be gray).
See the pic above for a comparison of the old (left) and new (right) design, and the one below (in the tweet) for another look at the freshly revamped colors.
These may not sound like massive changes – and to be fair, they aren’t, they’re essentially tweaks. But they have rubbed a number of users up the wrong way. As Android Authority points out, there’s some quite spicy feedback on the new Google Maps on Reddit, X (formerly Twitter) and other online forums.
So my Google Maps looks like this now and my question is, why would you fix something that wasn’t broken? 🙈 The bright colors and low contrast are breaking my brain. Please, at least let me choose old color scheme 🥲 pic.twitter.com/Co1ZDaoPW4November 16, 2023
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Analysis: Lacking clarity?
Some of this is unfamiliarity, as no one likes change, and it takes time to acclimatize to a new look – but there are some consistent and well-observed pieces of feedback on the redeployment of colors for Google Maps.
One common thread is criticism of the new colors lacking clarity, and making it trickier to see what’s what at a glance (and when driving obviously you will just be glancing at the display).
As one Redditor put it: “I’m finding it a little hard to read as quickly as I used to. The toned down look is cute but not practical.”
Another problem highlighted by multiple users on Reddit is that the new alternate routes being blue – as well as the main route, albeit that’s a darker blue – is an issue. It can be difficult to tell those routes apart on a phone at a bit of a distance (and with other potential factors thrown into the mix like sun glare).
Overall, Google may want to have a rethink, particularly around the alternate routes. That said, not everyone is unhappy with the changes, but the majority seem to be at least according to a poll Android Authority is running.
This shows that 44% of respondents don’t like the new colors, compared to 28% who do (with the rest abstaining). So, that doesn’t look great for Google, though of course, it’s a limited sample of around 800 people (at the time of writing).
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