Google, Allo - Current Affairs Questions and Answers

ANSWER: Neural machine translation technology

Explanation:
Google unveiled a new set of products and features for Indian languages to better serve the needs of Indians who were coming online rapidly.

Google Translate will use a new ‘neural machine translation technology’ to translate between English and nine widely-used Indian languages. These include Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. Other languages are Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati.

The firm indicated neural translation offered a huge improvement over the old phrase-based system, translating full sentences at a time instead of pieces of a sentence.

This change improves the quality of translation in a single jump than seen in the last ten years combined.

Sharing insights from the joint report “Indian Languages - Defining India’s Internet” - by Google and consulting firm KPMG India, the company stated the country had 234 million Indian language users who were online compared with 175 million English web users.

Google aims for another 300 million Indian language users to come online in the next four years.

The extension of neural machine translation to Chrome browser’s built-in auto-translate functionality to web content would make full-page translations more accurate and easier to read.

The content ranges from song lyrics to cricket discussions.

The new translation capability will also be available to users on Google search and Maps to aid discovery of new places such as cafes and hotels with translations of local reviews on Google Maps, both on mobile and desktop.

Extending support to cover all 22 scheduled Indian languages, Google also rolled out new Gboard, a keyboard for Android unveiled in launched in December 2016.

It has transliteration support for languages.such as Urdu, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali.

With Google Search built right into the keyboard, Gboard will allow users to ‘search’ and use Google Translate right on their keyboard.

For users who often switch back and forth between Hindi and English, they will also be able to use ‘Hinglish’ language option with new text editing tool.

ANSWER: Tez

Explanation:
On 18th Sept 2017, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley launched Google’s payment app - ‘Tez’.

Tez by Google is perhaps the simplest form of monetary transactions.

Tez by Google and other ecosystems will make a major change in the digital payments landscape in India.

The tech giant claimed that Tez will enable money transfer directly from the bank accounts of customers, without them having to share their ‘personal information’.

The app will function on both Android and iOS platforms.

Google also said that the app will ‘understand’ eight Indian languages and will work with 55 banks

Tez (which means “Fast” in Hindi is Google’s play to replace cash transactions and become a more central part of how people pay for things, using their mobile to do so.

But it’s also a chance for the company to push out some new technologies - like audio QR (AQR), which lets users transfer money by letting their phones speak to each other with sounds - to see how it can make that process more frictionless, and therefore more attractive to use than cash itself.

Tez will see Google linking up with several major banks in the country by way of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) - a payment standard and system backed by the government in its push to bring more integrated banking services into a very fragmented market.

There will also be phones coming to the market from Lava, Micromax, Nokia and Panasonic with Tez preloaded, the company said.

Google has confirmed to me that payments made and taken using UPI are free for consumers and small merchants

To be clear, Tez is not a mobile “wallet” in the same way as PayTM offers a mobile wallet, where money is stored in the app and needs to be topped up to be used;

It’s more like Apple’s Wallet or other mobile wallets in the west: a place that links up your phone with your bank accounts to let you use your phone as a way to deduct payments from those accounts.

Supported banks include Axis, HDFC Bank, ICICI and State Bank of India and others that support UPI.

Online payment partners include large food chains like Dominos, transport services like RedBus, and Jet Airways

The app has support for English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.

For money transfers, there is a limit of ₹1,00,000 in one day across all UPI apps, and 20 transfers in one day.

AQR and Tez: Know More

• Google says that AQR - the sound-based format for transferring money securely between devices - is its own proprietary technology.
• This appears to be the first time that Google has used it for payments, although it has used ultrasonic sound for transferring information between devices before
• For example, the tech has been used in Chromecast to connect devices since 2014. Other startups that have used audio-based “codes” to transfer payments and other data before include Lisnr, and Chirp.
• While AQR might seem like a neat technical twist, there are some practical reasons behind why Google might opt for this in Tez.
• For starters, it obviates the need for NFC in the device, and in the payment devices of merchants or whoever else a person is planning to transact with.
• The other thing is that it makes any kind of contactless transaction with the device fairly flexible and easy.
  
• Services like Airdrop on iPhones require Bluetooth and if you’ve used it before isn’t that seamless and foolproof to turn on (even though it works like a charm when it does). QR codes, meanwhile, require you to turn on the camera on your device and physically align it with a code on another screen, a potentially fiddly and difficult process.
• Using audio taps into some of the most basic features on even the most basic phones, a speaker and a microphone.
• Google has also trademarked the name in other Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, so there seems to be a wider strategy to expand this to other regions.
• India, the second-most populated country in Asia after China, is a ripe market for mobile payment services, with a rapidly expanding middle class with more disposable income and a wider population that is very tech-focussed, with an estimated 300 million smartphones in use today.
• Digital payments are expected to reach a volume of $500 billion annually by 2020, according to a report from BCG and Google.

ANSWER: All of the above

Explanation:
Google on Sept 12, 2017 unveiled several updates to its Translate App in an effort to bring down language barriers.

It said users in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi can experience offline translations and instant visual translation in their preferred language.

The biggest application is that they are breaking language barriers.

Google Translate has also added support for conversation mode in regional languages including Tamil and Bengali.

This feature lets users have a bilingual conversation with someone, simply by talking to the Google Translate app.

Google Translate: Know More

• India is among the top four countries globally using Google Translate which translates over 140 billion words every day.
• More than 400 million people in India used the Internet.
• But the vast majority of India’s online content is in English, which only 20% of the country’s population speaks.
• The Translate app already lets the user use camera mode to snap a photo of English text and get a translation for it in these languages.
• Now, with Word Lens feature, Google has taken it to the next level, letting users instantly translate text using their camera.
• The company said now it was way easier for speakers of local Indian languages to understand English street signs in the city or decide what to order from a restaurant menu.
• Word Lens is powered by machine learning, using computer vision to distinguish between letters on an image.
• With the company's Google Translate, users can easily turn their phone into a powerful translation tool, whether for studies, business, travel or work.
• Offline support enables Indian language users to translate a word or sentence even when they are not connected to the Internet.

ANSWER: Drive File Stream

Explanation:
Google let fly an announcement that PC and Mac desktop app for Google Drive is going the way of the Dodo bird.

As the new alternative, customers will have two options.

For those using the G Suite service, the solution is called Drive File Stream, an app that will allow for quicker, more streamlined access to their files and also the ability to choose which ones are made available offline.

For non-G Suite users, another app called Backup and Sync will be the way to go.

It will have all the same features as the Google Drive desktop app that most users currently access on a regular basis, but with an added photo capability as well.

This seems to be a move towards making Google more of a one-stop shop for your online cloud storage.

The Backup and Sync app will allow users to store a large amount of photos, provided they're cool with the slight compression that will happen during the upload process.

If not, they'll have to pay extra for more storage.

After the debacle that was Google+, the company is hoping that, with this change, more customers will be housing all of their data in their infrastructure instead of with other providers.

ANSWER: Bengali

Explanation:
Aimed at helping Bengali speakers discover new information quickly, Google on March 29, 2017 announced the introduction of Knowledge Graph in the Bengali language on Google Search.

What is more, Google said its search will now also support spell correction for Bengali queries, improving the search experience for the millions of Bengali speakers around the world.

The Knowledge Graph enables users to search for things, people or places that Google knows about - landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more.

This will help over 200 million Bengali speakers to search for things they care about,

Google Knowledge Graph is currently available in 41 languages and it is tuned based on what people search for, and what Google finds out on the web, improving results over time.

The feature allows users to get straight to the answer and not trillions of webpages to scroll through.

Knowledge Graph: Know More

• The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's search results.
• It uses semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources.
• Knowledge Graph display was added to Google's search engine in 2012.
• It was starting in the United States, having been announced on May 16, 2012.

ANSWER: Perspective

Explanation:
Alphabet Inc's Google and subsidiary Jigsaw launched on 23^rd Feb 2017 a new technology to help news organisations and online platforms identify abusive comments on their websites.

The technology, called Perspective, will review comments and score them based on how similar they are to comments people said were toxic or likely to make them leave a conversation.

The tool has been tested on New York Times and the companies hope to extend it to other news organisations such as The Guardian and The Economist as well as websites.

Perspective examined hundreds of thousands of comments that had been labelled as offensive by human reviewers to learn how to spot potentially abusive language.

The company was open to rolling out the technology to all platforms, including larger ones such as Facebook and Twitter where trolling can be a major headache.

The technology could in the future be expanded to trying to identify personal attacks or off-topic comments too.

Perspective will not decide what to do with comments it finds are potentially abusive; rather publishers will be able to flag them to their moderators or develop tools to help commenters understand the impact of what they are writing.

The initiative against trolls follows efforts by Google and Facebook to combat fake news stories in France, Germany and the United States after they came under fire during the US presidential vote.

The debate surrounding fake news has led to calls from politicians for social networks to be held more liable for the content posted on their platforms.

Jigsaw: Know More

• Formerly called: Google Ideas (2010–2015)
• Type: Think tank
• Founded: 2010
• Founders: Eric Schmidt
• Headquarters: New York City, United States
• Jared Cohen (President)
• Parent : Google (2010–2015)/Alphabet Inc. (2015–present)
• Website: jigsaw.google.com

ANSWER: Ooty

Explanation:
Google, in partnership with Indian railways RailTel on 22nd Dec 2016 launched Railwire Wi-Fi at Udhagamandalam (Ooty).

With this it succeed in fulfilling the commitment to bring high-speed Internet to 100 railway stations by the end of 2016.

With over 5 million monthly users, the Google-Railtel Wi-Fi is helping millions of Indians discover the benefits of Internet with 15,000 first time users connecting to the network every day.

Nearly 1 crore passengers who pass through these stations every day have an access to the free Internet.

The users need to select Railwire as a preferred Wi-Fi network and enter a four-digit OTP (one-time password) to access data services.

The initiative launched in January this year, Google said, will continue to deploy the Wi-Fi at next 300 stations over a period of a couple of years.

Google

• CEO: Sundar Pichai (Since 2015)
• Founded: September 4, 1998, Menlo Park, California, United States
• Revenue: 74.54 billion USD
• Subsidiaries: YouTube, Nik Software, AdMob, ITA Software
• Founders: Larry Page, Sergey Brin

RailTel


• Native name: रेलटेल कॉर्पोरेशनऑफ़इंडियालिमिटेड
• Type: Public sector undertaking (PSU)
• Industry: Telecommunications
• Founded: September 2000;
• Headquarters: 143, Institutional Area, Sector-44, Gurgaon, Haryana, India
• R.K. Bahuguna (Chairman & MD)
• Services: RailTel Services, Carrier Service-Leased Line, NLD for Voice Carriage, Managed Co locations Enterprise Service (MPLS-VPN), Internet

ANSWER: Google Photo Scan

Explanation:
Search engine major Google has launched the scanning app Google PhotoScan on 16th November 2016 to scan and digitise physical photographs.

• The app is maintained by Google PhotosIt detects edges of the picture, straightens the image and rotates it to the correct orientation
• It ensures old photos are clear and glare-free
• It also uses AR to create 4 points near the frame and uses the 4 photos to create composite image without glare
• The set up of the app is effortless as it directs users on how to try out the app; users can adjust corners and rotate scanned pictures as per their preferences
• Once photos have been scanned, one tap enables them to be saved to Google Photos
• Saved photos can be stored, searched and shared
• The App can be used on Android and iOS devices both
• This app makes it easy to preserve memories in old printed photos
• The app lets users adjust the crop to remove the hint of background surface peeking into the photo
• Once the scanning is complete the app saves your photo
• There are also a host of new photo-editing options on board
• Auto enhance feature tweaks brightness, contrast, saturation and other characteristics of the photo
• It recognises what a photo editor might need to enhance the image

ANSWER: Kiara Nirghin

Explanation:
Kiara, an Indian girl of S. African nationality won the Google Science Fair prize 2016 winning the grand prize of USD 50,000 to use an orange peel for discovering a cheaper, super absorbent material that retains soil water

• Her project was entitled “No More Thirsty Crops” and was aimed at tackling the severe drought plaguing South Africa. Her solution to the problem of drought uses orange and avocado fruit peel that is normally discarded
• Google Science Fair is a programme for budding scientists between ages of 13-18 who solve world challenges through science and technology
• Kiara’s project uses the fruit peel to serve as a SAP or super absorbent polymer alternative, which absorbs and carries 300 times its own weight in liquid relative to the mass
• SAPs are not biodegradable and are costly and full of chemicals
• It was after 45 days of studies that Kiara succeeded in creating low cost, SAP made out of products from the juice manufacturing industry
• The polymer can retain large amounts of water, ensuring the soil remain moist and improving crop growth without regular water supplements.

ANSWER: Google

Explanation:
Google will set up its first India data centre in Mumbai by 2017.

• It aims to take on global competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft who have a presence in the nation
• The search engine also plans for local customers to host their applications on their internet via this data centre
• Google controls majority market share in India in search, email and smartphones through its Android operating system
• It has significant offerings in enterprise applications such as mail and other services, but lags behind in cloud business
• Amazon currently has three data centres in Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi with over 750,000 customers including Ola, TATA Motors and NDTV on its cloud
• Microsoft in 2015, set up three data centres in India offering Azure cloud to local clients
• Google, which already hosts applications of its Indian customers such as Wipro, Ashok Leyland, Smartshift by Mahindra & Mahindra, Dainik Bhaskar Group and INshorts.com on its global cloud platform, expects a India presence to service local customers faster.
• Google calls it data centre Cloud Region.
• The Google Cloud Platform has taken infrastructure, machine learning and networking services use to power Google services and make them available to businesses and developers with high performance app and data analysis at a low cost
• India’s startup community continues to grow and cloud platform provides a base for deploying and testing apps