Google adds voice commands to Android smartphones
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Google rolled out an application that lets people use voice commands to have Android-based smartphones do tasks such as send email or fetch driving directions.
Read more on AFP via Yahoo!Xtra News
Vlingo Adds SafeReader Free to Vlingo for BlackBerry smartphones
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 24 /PRNewswire/ — Vlingo Corporation, maker of the world’s most popular mobile voice application, today announced version 4.5 of Vlingo, offering a new, free feature that gives users more “hands-free” control of their BlackBerry® smartphones and helps deter driving while texting (DWT).
Read more on redOrbit
Premier League fine adds to Pompey’s problems
Cash-strapped crisis club Portsmouth were fined a reported seven figure sum by the English Premier League (EPL) on Monday for several rule breaches this season.
Read more on AFP via Yahoo! News
Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.
Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don’t need it for.
One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google’s servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.
In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new “Content Settings” option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.
With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn’t easy. While these new features aren’t available for Mac and Linux users yet, it’s likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.
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Google just cannot stop releasing great products this month. Today the Google News team is releasing a great new feature that will help you scan through older archived newspapers in style.
From the Google News team:
Were excited to announce the launch of browse mode for newspapers in Archives! To do so, click Browse this newspaper to view other editions from that newspaper!
Google has somehow found, indexed, scanned, and made available endless newspaper material for you to browse (for free of course). Exactly which papers you can browse is not laid out in perfect terms, but if you are searching for an article and you see the Browse This Newspaper button, you are all set.
It looks like this:
The view that Google provides for you to browse is quite pretty. Newspapers are sorted by newspaper name, and month of publication. Google for example has a good selection of papers from the News and Eastern Townships Advocate. The browse screen looks like this:
Good on Google for making more information even more accessible. I doubt that I will ever use this, but knowing that it exists makes me even more sure that our past will not be lost.
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