Weekly Update - October 19, 2019: Pixel 4, Blogger app, Recorder

This week Google announced the new Pixel, Pixelbook, and Nest devices, with an updated Assistant and smart features for audio transcription, photography and more. Plus there are updates for Google Books readers, Bloggers, YouTubers and we learned more about Google’s shifted focus from VR to AR, the demise of Yahoo Groups and Mark Zuckerberg’s thoughts on free expression.

With the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, I reflected on what the experience was like trying to find information from thousands of miles away, and how it might be different today. I also tried out the MyShake app, which is tied to the California Earthquake Early Warning system, and designed to give a quake warning as much as “tens of seconds” before it hits. Unfortunately, as it runs in the background it used a lot of battery power. I’m hoping there will be updates to improve that.
This week was Google’s annual fall hardware “Made by Google” event. They announced the Pixel 4 phone, new Pixel Buds, a “more affordable” Pixelbook Go, a new Nest (formerly Home) Mini with a better speaker,new Nest Wifi system, the imminent arrival of the Stadia gaming system and more.
The Pixel 4’s “gee whiz” feature is the Project Soli motion-sensing radar that lets you control apps (a bit) wit gestures, and unlocking your phone with FaceID. That unlocking process is being criticized for working while the phone owner’s eyes are closed, rather than requiring active “attention”.
The Pixel 4 has an updated camera, of course. There are two cameras on the back, with a telephoto lens to give you “Super Res Zoom”. And you can manually tune brightness and shadows. To show off the quality, photographer Annie Liebovitz took a series of portraits with her Pixel.
The Camera app on the Pixel 4 has a new “Astrophotography”-capable Night Sight setting, that lets you take photos of the starry night sky. This will also be coming to the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a Camera app.
The Pixel 4 comes with Live Caption, which adds captions live to any audio, including video on demand, podcasts, and any spoken audio on your device (excluding phone calls and video calls). It’s currently English only, with more languages coming in the “near future”. This will also be available for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a later this year, and may eventually come to other Android phone models.
The Pixel 4 comes with the Google Recorder audio recording software that transcribes English speech in real-time, with no internet connection required. The transcript is shareable (with or without linked audio) and searchable. While Google has said the Recorder app will only be available for the Pixel 4, I side-loaded the app on my Pixel 3a and it seems to work fine (YMMV).
The Pixel 4 also comes with a personal safety app that can detect whether you have been in a car crash, and call 911 automatically for assistance. That’s available in US English only.
Pixel 4 owners can try Google One (with 100GB Google cloud storage) free for three months, and can schedule a “Pro Session” Hangout Meet video call to get expert assistance setting up and using your new phone.
Google Assistant has been updated to better understand queries and take up less screen space. It’s English-only for now.
Android now has support for hearing aids. You can pair a hearing aid with an Android phone “right out of the box” using Bluetooth Low Energy, which saves on battery life.
Amidst all the new devices, Google quietly removed the Google Clip “smart” camera from the Google Store. Launched in 2017, it was designed to automatically take short video clips of special moments with your family. Existing Clips cameras will be supported by Google until December 2021.
The Daydream View VR viewer is also dead. It has been removed from the Play Store and existing devices are not compatible with the Pixel 3a or new Pixel 4. Google told Engadget that there hadn’t been the “broad consumer or developer adoption” they had hoped and that they will be focusing their development efforts on AR, like Google Lens, AR walking navigation in Maps, AR Search, and “Beauty Try-On” ads on YouTube (or become Maleficent!).

But there was more this week than just hardware and Android updates:

Blogger’s Android app got a much-needed update. It now has material design and (importantly) doesn’t crash on recent devices. It’s very simple, only letting you you create, edit and manage posts in an existing blog. But there is now the potential for future updates.
Google Books - Google’s sometimes controversial project to “bring the world’s books online” - turned 15 this week.It also got a fresh design, making it easier to access a book’s details, an easy citation tool, and improved in-text search. And just for fun, there’s a new Google Arts & Culture tool that lets you find books related to a selected picture.
You can now customize text size and position of captions in Google Slides.
Adding a note to Google Keep on desktop just got easier. Just enter note.new , notes.new or keep.new in your browser’s address bar.
If you use Feedly as your feed reader, they are looking for beta testers for a new Google Assistant Action that will read your feed headlines, read articles and let you save articles to boards to access later.
All content posted to Yahoo Groups will be deleted on December 14th. Users have until then to download their data (which could take several weeks). Groups aren’t going away entirely. However, all public groups will be made private or restricted, and it will no longer be possible to upload content. What you will be able to do is email members of the group.
David Bloom at Tubefilter writes about the current complexities for companies that depend on creators that want to stay on good terms with China.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech about his thoughts on free expression, explaining why he thinks the platform should be more “open” (which is why they don’t fact check political ads), and apparently is mostly concerned with the “authenticity” of the speakers (meaning they are trying to remove bots and similar “fake” accounts). He said little to address concerns people have expressed about the content that is allowed, while implying that the beginnings of Facebook were related to free speech about the Iraq war, seemingly forgetting its early origins as an undergrad "hot or not" site.

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Image: Closeup of Infinicube by Gabe Levy and Mike Singletary. Photo by me.