You can use Google Assistant to process payments with supported merchants

You may or may not know it but at the start of April, Google has allowed users in Canada as well as Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK input their payment and delivery information in Google Assistant settings. Through this feature you can add your payment method (credit or debit card) as well as shipping address. These payment profiles can be used to pay for items and services of third-party services that have implemented the feature. Just head to the Payments menu in your Google Assistant settings to input your information.

Source: Android Police

YouTube’s homepage adds subscribe button to channels you often watch from

A new test YouTube is trying out with some users entices them to subscribe to channels they often watch videos from. As it is now, the YouTube homepage shows the usual mix of recommended videos from channels you follow and those that have content based on things you’ve watched in the past. For some users, they’ve started to see this new text below some videos: “Love *insert channel name*? Never miss an upload!” The subscribe button is placed to the right of the text. Apparently this doesn’t appear for all channels but for those you watch a lot of content from but haven’t subscribed to yet. Hopefully if it does roll out to more users, there is an option that will let you say no. Some might not want to subscribe to specific channels but, of course, being bugged about that at each turn can become annoying.

Source: Android Police

Google has big plans for podcasts

Zack Reneau-Wedeen (Photo by @coletterobinson )

Aside from being able to listen to podcasts right from the search window, it looks like Google has so big plans for podcasts on its platform. There are three key features the company wants to hone in on in the coming years. None of these are real technologies yet but it does introduce to us what Google wants to happen with the medium. Google Podcasts Product Manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen (pictured above) said in the latest part of the five-part series on Pacific Content that they are working to “make these experiences possible.”

The three key things include instant transcription, lookahead scrubbing, and instant translation. With the help of artificial intelligence, Google will be able to “listen” to each podcast episode and transcribe these into a time-stamped document that can be searchable. Not only will this make it easier to jump to specific parts of a podcast but it will also help with searches on Google itself, so if you want to find something out, you might be directed to a podcast where that subject matter is being discussed. Lookahead scrubbing will work similar to what you can do with YouTube videos. With the help of the text transcription, you’ll be able to scrub ahead on podcasts and head straight into parts you want to listen to. And then Google also wants to bring instant translation to podcasts so that if English or whatever language the podcast is on, it’ll translate it into a language you understand. And with the help of AI, it might even be able to deliver that in the original voice tones of the podcasters.

Google readies I/O app for 2018 developers’ conference

With Google I/O happening soon, the tech company has taken the time to refresh the app for the developers’ conference. The app itself is already available for download and introduces some important features you’ll need for Google I/O. It will let you reserve seats for sessions. There’s no limit to how many reservations you can have as long as none of these overlap. But you can opt to star events so you can keep track of them. A big chunk of Google I/O is live-streamed so you can watch there.

The app gets a new look, too, with the bottom navigation bar and a system navigation bar to match that. You can see general info, schedule, and map in the navigation bar. The Google I/O app also gives you access to important information about the event, travel details, and FAQs.

Source: Android Police