DPA

Google says it will begin deleting inactive accounts in December, meaning anyone who hasn’t used their Gmail account in a long time may want to sign in again to stop it from being deleted. As part of a new purge of dormant accounts announced in May, Google now says if you haven’t used or signed into your account for at least 2 years, it may delete the account and its contents. For Google users, this means not only losing an email address, but any photos, emails, Google docs and notes that were saved in a Google account. However, you would first have to completely forget your Google account for…

Google reached large parts of the population in Germany in the summer with a video campaign to combat misinformation and manipulation attempts on the net. According to the Google subsidiary Jigsaw, 21.9 million users on YouTube alone watched the three educational videos, which were played out as advertisements, in June and July – corresponding to 58% of the 18 to 54-year-old population in Germany. The videos were also seen on Facebook and Instagram from the rival Meta group, where they reached 20.6 million people in the same age group, or 54% of them. One of the videos showed the manipulation …

Google said on Thursday it plans to begin manufacturing Pixel smartphones in India, a country the US tech giant calls a “priority market.” The company said it will work with domestic and foreign manufacturers in India so that the first made-in-India Google Pixel 8 smartphones can be available from next year. Other tech companies are also increasingly eyeing manufacturing operations in India, which with its 1.4 billion inhabitants is seen as a key growth market. Google’s Android operating system is dominant in India, although the company has had several run-ins with competition regulators there…

Following several user reports of models of the newly launched iPhone 15 Pro getting unusually hot, Apple has acknowledged the problem and confirmed that it is due to software bugs that will soon be fixed. A flaw in the new iOS 17 operating system is to blame in some instances, while a few apps such as Instagram and Uber have also caused the phones to overheat, Apple told financial wire Bloomberg. Instagram fixed the problem with an update in late September. The reports of iPhones heating up had triggered speculation that the new titanium body or the freshly developed chip might have been to b…

Apple has released iOS 17 and in doing so turned your iPhone into an information monitor to give you helpful updates when it’s sitting idly on your nightstand or charging and not being used. The current time, favourite photos, responses from Siri and incoming calls are the kinds of things that the always-on display can now show you if you prop up your phone. Apple has designed the so-called StandBy mode so that you can still read updates from the other side of the room. In Night Mode, the feature also switches to a low-light red tone to avoid blinding you at bedtime. Apple has also built other…

Google’s chatbot Bard will in future help users to recognise false statements in the AI system’s answers, which are currently still unreliable. Like responses from AI chatbot ChatGPT, Bard’s answers are often written in flawless English and appear authoritative. However both systems have been known to generate statements that look factual but are entirely wrong. To help with this problem, Bard now offers a “double check response” button with a colourful Google logo, Google manager Jack Krawczyk announced in Mountain View on Tuesday. The parts of the answer that Bard is very sure about will the…

Berlin (dpa) — It used to be that if you wanted to buy a foldable smartphone there was only one brand available, Samsung. Now Google is trying to muscle into the market for this unusual form factor with new models from the two manufacturers going head to head. Both phones — Google’s Pixel Fold and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 5 — have large 7.6-inch inner displays when opened, but their design is very different. When folded, the Galaxy is significantly narrower than Google’s challenger. So if you look at the pure diagonals of the outer displays, Samsung is ahead. However, in practice it turns out t…

Until now, Google’s Android mascot has looked rather flat and two-dimensional, but that is about to change with a facelift for the Bugdroid robot, often seen accompanying updates to the world’s most used mobile operating system. A three-dimensional update is part of an effort to make the mascot more vivid and dynamic, Google says in a September blog post announcing the update. The droid is also set to become more varied in its depictions, and instead of the usual green colour, we’ll soon see more colourful and playful varieties. Google says the 3D update applies both to the logo, on which the …

Google’s in-the-works generative AI tool is five times as powerful as the latest market-leading GPT-4 variants, and could also be 20 times as powerful as ChatGPT by the end of 2024, according to SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research business. After appearing to nod off at the wheel while the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney raced into an early lead with their AI tools, “the sleeping giant, Google has woken up,” the company said in a report at the end of August. However SemiAnalysis speculated that the Alphabet-owned internet search giant might not want to make its new Gemini model publicly avai…

For around a quarter of a century, journeys across through the web have been beginning with a small box on a screen into which we type a few words. Competitors large and small have tried in vain to dethrone Google since its rise 25 years ago. Microsoft in particular poured billions into its search engine Bing – and still remains far behind in the web search business. But then, at the end of last year, ChatGPT was launched, a chatbot that could formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human – and at lightning speed. Immediately the question arose: Is a chat interface like this not the u…

Google has launched a second cloud services region in Germany, in the Berlin-Brandenburg area, the internet giant announced on Tuesday. It is Google’s second cloud region in Europe’s biggest economy after Frankfurt and the 12th in Europe. The new location ensures shorter response times for the transfer of data, Google said. The firm said that customers in Germany will be able to improve the reliability of their services by spreading them over two locations, both of which will be operated in accordance with German data protection laws. Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner was quoted as saying that “the new …

Berlin (dpa) — Google has not been lucky with tablets in the past. It all started very promisingly eleven years ago when the Nexus 7 tablet was at least a respectable success as an inexpensive alternative to Apple’s iPad. However, its successor, the Pixel Slate, was a flop and Google withdrew from the tablet market — until now. The US company is now back with a tablet called the Pixel. The Android device comes with a magnetic charging dock that not only supplies the tablet with power, but also turns it into a smart display. Without the dock, the Pixel looks like a normal tablet. The colours of…

American Airlines and Google were able to cut contrails made by jets by more than half during a small trial, a move that could significantly reduce the global-warming footprint of the travel industry, but with a slight increase to fuel use. As the airline industry pushes and waits for more sustainable fuels and alternative power engines, many major carriers have shifted focus to the emerging field of studying contrails, once considered an innocent byproduct of water vapour at high altitudes. But those whispy clouds are actually a significant environmental detriment because they hold heat in th…

Google and Universal Music are discussing a licensing deal that could see artists’ voices made available for songs generated by artificial intelligence (AI), according to the Financial Times newspaper. The reported talks come amid concerns about so-called deepfake audio and video material that could see artists mimicked without their consent, potentially taking in the unwary listener. But artists would receive royalties for any content generated under the Google-Universal proposal. An opt-out clause for artists is also under consideration, according to the newspaper, which further reported tha…

Google has renewed the images of German streets in its Street View service after more than a decade. On Tuesday, the company updates its virtual views of the 20 largest German cities online. It also added images of further regions throughout Germany. With Street View, users can see photographic views of streets from Google’s map service and move around in them on the screen. When Street View was introduced in Germany at the end of 2010, the service met opposition from politicians, homeowners and data protection groups. At the time, almost a quarter of a million people in Germany exercised thei…

Smartwatch users will be happy to learn that WhatsApp has finally come up with a version for devices running on Google’s Wear OS operating system, allowing you to check and reply to your messages without having to pull out your phone. All you need to do is install the new WhatsApp version on your phone after downloading it from Google’s Play Store, and you will be able to use all the standard functions including audio notes and voice calls. Your smartwatch can even display photos and you are also able to send stickers, and block, report or mute conversations. In order to link your smartwatch t…