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Tag: Google
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Google Calendar removes Pride Month, cultural heritage months – National Catholic Register
Before the change, Google Calendar users would automatically have the start of “Pride Month” listed on their calendars for June 1. In June, the secular observance celebrates homosexuality and transgenderism. For Catholics, the month of June is dedicated to celebrating the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Other observances that are no longer automatically displayed on Google Calendar include Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day, among others. It also included other celebrations unrelated to cultural identities, such as Teachers’ Day, which are no longer automatically listed on calendars.
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Changes to cultural moments in Google Calendar – Google Keyword
Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of moments in a wide number of countries around the world — things like cultural celebrations, teachers days and many more. We got feedback that many other events and countries were missing, and it just wasn’t feasible to put hundreds of moments in everyone’s calendars — so in mid-2024 we made the decision to simplify and show only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com. Contrary to some of the comments on social media, this was not something we did just this year.
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One user called the move “shameful” and said that the platform is being used to “capitulate to fascism.” Over the last few years, there have been comments and media reports complaining about the presence of the notes, but now they’re gone.
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Google Maps now shows the ‘Gulf of America’ – The Verge
It made the change after the Trump administration formally changed the name today of the body of water spanning between the eastern coast of Mexico and the Florida panhandle. … Users in Mexico will continue to see “Gulf of Mexico,” while the rest of the world will see the original name with “Gulf of America” in parentheses.
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As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders – Ars Technica
Smart TVs: This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases—even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy. When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something’s up. With this approach, TVs miss the opportunity to appeal to customers with more relevant and impressive upgrades. There’s also a growing desire among users to disconnect their connected TVs, defeating their original purpose. Suddenly, buying a dumb TV seems smarter than buying a smart one. But smart TVs and the ongoing revenue opportunities they represent have made it extremely hard to find a TV that won’t spy on you. […]
Google search: Admittedly, some AI summaries may be useful, but they can just as easily provide false, misleading, and even dangerous answers. And in a search context, placing AI content ahead of any other results elevates an undoubtedly less trustworthy secondary source over primary sources at a time when social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are increasingly relying on users to fact-check misinformation.
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Is Google Maps fatally misleading drivers in India? It’s complicated – Rest of World
When Google Maps launched in India in 2008, it initially struggled due to the lack of street names, which were the foundation of its technology globally. In an X post from October 2023, Elizabeth Laraki, who led the global design team for Google Maps from 2007 to 2009, wrote that this rendered the app’s directions “pretty much useless.” The company subsequently used parks, monuments, shopping centers, landmark buildings, and gas stations to confirm directions instead.
Over the years, Google has launched several new features to improve Maps in India, including voice navigation and transliterated directions in about nine and 10 languages, respectively, to increase accessibility. Most recently, in 2024, the company introduced a simplified interface for reporting road incidents, two new weather-related alerts for streets obscured by flooding or fog, an artificial-intelligence model that estimates road widths, and a feature that alerts users to approaching overpasses in 40 cities.
Google has mapped 300 million buildings, 35 million businesses and places, and streets stretching across 7 million kilometres (over 4 million miles) in India, Ramani told Rest of World.
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Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance – The Washington Post
Google’s principles restricting national security use cases for AI had made it an outlier among leading AI developers. Late last year, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it would work with military manufacturer Anduril to develop technology for the Pentagon. Anthropic, which offers the chatbot Claude, announced a partnership with defense contractor Palantir to help U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access versions of Claude through Amazon Web Services. Google’s rival tech giants Microsoft and Amazon have long partnered with the Pentagon.[…]
Google’s policy change is a company shift in line with a view within the tech industry, embodied by President Donald Trump’s top adviser Elon Musk, that companies should be working in service of U.S. national interests. It also follows moves by tech giants to publicly disavow their previous commitment to race and gender equality and workforce diversity, policies opposed by the Trump administration.
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It currently supports select services: oil changes, tire and brake replacements, emissions tests, and manicure/pedicure appointments. … Businesses can opt out of receiving AI-generated calls, and Google states it “clearly discloses” when a call is automated. While the feature promises time-saving convenience, we’ll have to see how smoothly the AI handles calls with poor audio quality, strong accents, or unexpected responses.
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321 real-world gen AI use cases from the world’s leading organizations – Google Cloud Blog
In our work with customers, we see their teams are increasingly focused on improving productivity, automating processes, and modernizing the customer experience. These aims are now being achieved through the AI agents they’re developing in six key areas: customer service; employee empowerment; code creation; data analysis; cybersecurity; and creative ideation and production.
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AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it – MIT Technology Review
Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a “zero-click” future, where search referral traffic—a mainstay of the web since before Google existed—vanishes from the scene. […]“We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where we’ve been in the past decade,” says Pichai. There are some real hazards here. First and foremost: Large language models will lie to you. They hallucinate. They get shit wrong. When it doesn’t have an answer, an AI model can blithely and confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, which has built its reputation over the past 20 years on reliability, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous.
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There’s a Squid Game Easter egg on Google – and it’s addictive – Euronews
It’s rather addictive and not as gory as the show, as if one of your players does get caught, they walk away – as opposed to their fate on the show, which is significantly bloodier. -
I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop – Ars Technica
For things that are bigger than a note or dry-erase board but smaller than paying for some single-use, subscription-based app, I build little private webapps with Glide. You might use something else, but Glide is a really nice entry into the spreadsheet-to-app milieu. The apps it creates are the kind that can easily be shared and installed (i.e., “Add to Home Screen”) on phones, tablets, or desktops, from a browser. -
Google Keep FAB redesign makes new notes a two-step process – 9to5Google
Previously, the bottom portion of Google Keep had a bar with buttons for creating a new list, drawing, audio, and photo note. Then there’s the cutout for a new note floating action button at the right. Google Keeps’ Material You redesign in 2021 changed that FAB from a circle to a rounded square, with the cutout feeling pretty out of place in Material 3. -
Everything you can do from Google Chrome’s address bar (besides run searches) – WIRED
Chrome’s omnibox is not just for typing out URLs or searching Google. Use it to take notes, write emails, and chat with Gemini.
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