Technology - Google News

All-new iPad Air with advanced A14 Bionic chip available to order starting today - Apple Newsroom

Posted: 16 Oct 2020 05:18 AM PDT

More Possibilities with iPadOS 14

The new iPad Air ships with iPadOS 14, which brings new features and designs that take advantage of the unique capabilities of iPad, such as its large Multi-Touch display, and versatile accessories. iPadOS 14 further integrates Apple Pencil into the iPad experience for better note-taking capabilities, and new ways to work with handwritten notes. When taking notes on iPad, Smart Selection uses on-device machine learning to distinguish handwriting from drawings, so handwritten text can easily be selected, cut, and pasted into another document as typed text using the same familiar gestures. Shape recognition allows users to draw shapes that are made geometrically perfect and snap right into place when adding diagrams and illustrations in Notes. Data detectors work seamlessly with handwritten text, recognizing phone numbers, dates, addresses, and links, making it easy for users to perform actions like tapping a handwritten number to make a call.

iPadOS 14 also brings Scribble to iPad, allowing Apple Pencil users to handwrite directly in any text field, making actions like replying to a quick iMessage or searching in Safari fast and easy — all without ever needing to put Apple Pencil away. Scribble uses on-device machine learning to convert handwriting into typed text in real time, so writing is always kept private and secure.

iPadOS 14 makes the iPad experience even more distinctive and powerful in other ways, including:

New compact designs for incoming FaceTime and phone calls, Siri interactions, and Search to help users stay focused on the task at hand.

Universal Search to quickly find practically anything, from locating and launching apps, to accessing contacts, files, and information, to getting answers to common questions about people or places.

New sidebars for many apps including Photos and Files, and streamlined toolbars that consolidate controls into a single place, making them more useful than ever.

Beautifully redesigned widgets that present timely information at a glance right on the Home Screen.

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Google now lets users search for a song by singing, humming and whistling - NME

Posted: 15 Oct 2020 06:07 PM PDT

An update released by Google today (October 16) allows users to search for a song by merely singing, humming or whistling the melody.

Announced at Google's Search On event, and effective from today, users will now be able to search for a song without knowing its title or even the lyrics.

Users can access the 'Hum To Search' feature by opening the 'Google Search' app or using the Google Search Widget. Once you tap on the microphone icon, you can ask "what's this song?" or click the 'Search a song' button.

Additionally, if using Google Assistant, users can ask "Hey Google, what's this song?".

From there, users will have a 10 – 15 second window to hum, whistle or sing the melody of a song they're thinking of, and Google will deliver a variety of matches, beginning with the highest per cent match.

Watch an ad for the feature below:

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"An easy way to explain it is that a song's melody is like its fingerprint: They each have their own unique identity," a post on The Google Blog says.

"We've built machine learning models that can match your hum, whistle or singing to the right 'fingerprint'."

"When you hum a melody into Search, our machine learning models transform the audio into a number-based sequence representing the song's melody, models are trained to identify songs based on a variety of sources, including humans singing, whistling or humming, as well as studio recordings," the post continues.

"The algorithms also take away all the other details, like accompanying instruments and the voice's timbre and tone. What we're left with is the song's number-based sequence, or the fingerprint."

The feature is currently available on both iOS and Android, with the latter providing the feature in over 20 different languages.

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