Google learns to speak French and German

“How many calories are there in a banana?”

From now on, you can speak such queries into a phone or tablet and receive a quick response — eighty-nine calories in English, quatre-vingt-neuf if you ask in French, or neunundachtzig kalorien in German. We’ve been on tour in recent weeks throughout Europe, from London to Paris and Hamburg, with our Google House, demonstrating our vision of the connected present. The star of the show was our most advanced Voice Search, which just has arrived in the UK, France and Germany.

In the kitchen, Voice Search can help you find just the right recipe — even if your hands are covered in flour. By talking to their smart device, our chefs in the Google House searched for recipes, asked for weight and temperature conversions, which we will speak right back, and even set a countdown timer on their device to remind them to take their lemon madeleines out of the oven.

Jamie and Ben from Sorted Food, YouTube’s largest cooking channel in Europe, showed us how Voice Search can help around the kitchen

We can also provide smart reminders, where you can asked to be notified when you're near the location for that particular task, such as “Remind me to pick up sugar next time I’m at Sainsburys.”

In the living room, voice can help you discover music, videos, photos, movies and other services, while the teen’s bedroom we showed how school kids could use use Voice Search to help with homework tasks — “Show me paintings by Picasso” pulls up a carousel of Pablo Picasso’s works right on the search page which can easily be scrolled through.

Google can help kids and adults alike with quick and easy answers

What makes the Voice Search extra-special is its ability to understand the context of a question. For example:

• Ask  “How old is David Beckham?” and then follow up with the question “And who is his wife?”, and Google knows you mean David Beckham’s wife.
• Ask “What is the weather like in Liverpool?,” you can follow-up with “How long does it take to drive there?”

This makes searching by voice like a real-life conversation. Fast and accurate voice recognition technology — available on Android and on the Google Search app on iPhone — enables us to understand exactly what you’re saying and provide speedy responses by tapping the microphone icon. For example, “Is British Airways flight 248 on time?”

The words appear as you speak, you get your answer immediately and—if it’s short and quick, like the status and departure time of your flight—we tell you the answer aloud.

By the time a guest was ready to leave Google House, he or she was encouraged to ask a simple question: “How do I get home?” We came up with the answer — and could even tell you when you need to leave depending on the traffic on your route.

Posted by Michael Valvo, Head of Product Communications, London

Visiting the Vatican’s ancient catacombs

They date back almost 2000 years, to the roots of the Christianity, and are dug deep into the ground by the Romans. Now, thanks to Google Maps, anyone can take a virtual visit of the early Christian burial sites in the ancient Priscilla catacombs and Dino Compagni catacombs.



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Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Commission of Culture and of the Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, which oversaw the catacombs restoration, first suggested the project to us in 2011. During the inauguration of the revamped museum of the Catacombs of Priscilla, the Cardinal said our project closed “the gap” between “two extremes, remote antiquity and today’s contemporary world.”

What our ancestors created is astounding. Restorers uncovered vivid late fourth-century frescoes depicting Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and Saints Peter and Paul accompanying Christians into the afterlife. Jesus’ face resembles portraits of the Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christian worship in 313. Users of Google Maps can now click the “see-inside” option for the catacombs, which allows them to move virtually through the narrow corridors tunneled out of soft tufa stone, and to see high-resolution images of the interiors from practically every angle.


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The artwork has spurred a fascinating debate. One fresco features a group of women celebrating a banquet and another shows a woman, dressed in robe and praying. Advocates for the ordination of women say it bolsters their assertions that women served as priests in the early church. But Fabrizio Bisconti, the superintendent of the Vatican's sacred archaeology commission, has said the women weren't celebrating Mass.

Whatever the truth, we are happy to contribute to art and culture. As this exciting project demonstrates, the Internet provides an extraordinary resource to make masterpieces available all around the world, or even under-earth!

Posted by Giorgia Abeltino, Google Senior Policy Counsel, Rome

Boosting the UK's creative and cultural industries

What can a 22 year old on YouTube teach the the Royal Shakespeare Company about entertaining audiences? Quite a lot, it turns out, when the YouTubers are stars like Danisnotonfire, who has had a 90% growth in traffic in the last year, or Michael Stevens, who is fast approaching 500 million views for his channel VSauce.



More than 300 British leaders from the arts, creative and cultural sector packed our Central St. Giles office in London to learn from each other - and from some of the new YouTube upstarts - how best to reach and entertain a global audience online. Together with us, the Arts Council, Creative England, Culture24 and the European Creative Industries Alliance organized the two day celebration. On the the first day, we focused on access to finance, and on the second, seizing online opportunities.

Two recurring big themes emerged:

• Personality - Art galleries and museums must engage online in a way that has authenticity, character and even intimacy. One great example was from Whitechapel Gallery, where young people at the gallery have set up their own blog, Duchamp and Sons, and twitter feed to talk about arts and their gallery in their own voice

• Collaboration - The British Postal Museum and Imperial War Museum explained how our own Cultural Institute online exhibitions has helped them not only reach new audiences but enabled collaboration with other institutions.

Every seat was taken for the two-day celebration

All too often, content industries have rushed to blame the Internet for hurting culture. It certainly is bringing change - but as this event shows, it also presents great opportunities for both traditional and new players.

Posted by Theo Bertram, Policy Manager, Google UK

Internet safety comes to the European Parliament

It was a cool way to launch a new book on an important subject. Teenagers and teachers from all over Europe recently converged at the European Parliament in Brussels to promote the educational handbook The Web we Want. The handbook for 13-16 year olds, developed by European Schoolnet in partnership with Liberty Global and us, outlines how teenagers can benefit from the web while staying safe. Click here to download.



For now, the book is only available in English. In 2014, our goal is to make the handbook available in eight additional languages.

The new handbook is just the latest of our educational materials. The YouTube Digital Citizenship Curriculum helps high school teachers educate their students on how to flag dangerous content. Classes from the Google Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum identify online tricks and scams. In Germany we’ve partnered with local NGO`s to publish a set of lesson plans to address topics like online reputation. The 250-page curriculum is available for free.

For updates on our efforts to support kids, students, teachers and parents exploring the web in a safe and confident way make sure to check our education resources and Good to Know page.

Posted by Sabine Frank, Media Literacy Counsel, Berlin

Moving Forward

For the past two years we’ve worked closely with the European Commission to settle their inquiry into our search and advertising businesses. We’ve put a lot of effort into addressing the Commission’s concerns, and earlier this year, after a good bit of back-and-forth with the Commission, we proposed a package of measures that the Commission felt comfortable testing in the marketplace.

The Commission subsequently asked us to go even further, including giving rival sites much more visibility in our search results. (The Commission has since confirmed that it seeks to promote visibility rather than to mandate where consumers click.) We addressed these requests with our revised offer, which broadens the scope of our offer and provides links to rival sites even more prominently in our search results. Specifically:

• We will give links to rival sites much more real estate and visibility
• We will include rival sites’ logos with these links for even greater prominence
• We will accompany these links with dynamic text from rivals providing more information about their sites

This news was widely reported in the press and you can see screenshots of these proposed links here.

As European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia said in a recent speech, the issue is choice for consumers. We've worked closely with a knowledgeable and professional team at the Commission to deliver just that. Users will be presented with alternative specialized search options right in the middle of some of the most valuable and prominent space on our search page. It is hard to see how anybody could reasonably claim that this will not offer users choice.

These weren’t easy concessions to make. Within Google, many asked why we would agree to such unprecedented and far-reaching changes to our continuously evolving search results. But we didn’t want to spend a decade fighting over these issues. We wanted to move forward, letting our engineers continue to do what they do best: building products that help users in their everyday lives.

Of course, we will never satisfy some critics, especially those with a professional and financial interest in impeding a successful competitor rather than helping users. As Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some in the anti-Google camp have lobbied for remedies that would help themselves at a cost to consumers. Others have worked to prolong the process to keep us in regulatory limbo, filing new complaints timed to disrupt our settlement negotiations. These complainants continue to recycle claims with no basis in law or fact, while failing to present constructive or realistic suggestions that would benefit consumers.

We’ve gone the extra mile to come up with a settlement that will resolve the Commission’s expressed concerns and allow everyone to focus on competing on the merits and creating innovative new services for consumers. We look forward to bringing this matter to a sound and reasonable conclusion.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Celebrating Spain’s Influence on the United States

Spaniards were among the first explorers to reach the coasts of the future United States, leaving a deep legacy on our culture, cuisine and customs, from Florida to California. We’re celebrating this influence this year in seven exciting new exhibitions on our Cultural Institute platform.



Spain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo and Felipe, Prince of Asturias, along with about 80 Spanish businessmen and officials, recently visited the Google headquarters in California to launch the exhibitions with our CEO Larry Page. The exhibits are timed to commemorate the the 500th anniversary of Juan Ponce de León landing in Florida and Vasco Nuñez de Balboa discovery of the the Pacific Ocean as well as the 300th anniversary of the birthday of Father Junipero Serra, who founded the first Catholic missions in California.

The exhibitions, curated by a historian appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tell the story of how the Spanish explorers arrived in America and what they did there in more than three centuries. In addition to Florida, Spaniards settled the entire U.S. Southwest: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. They built the region’s first cities and their missions, fortifications, and ranches left an indeliable mark on architecture. They build important roads. They brought new livestock and agricultural techniques. They even played a role in winning independence from the British.

Explore the Spanish legacy in the United States, and enjoy an example of how heritage and the Internet, old and new, can be combined to increase our understanding.

Posted by Barbara Navarro, Director, Public Policy, Madrid

Slovakia’s Eagle flies high with the Internet

It has been an audacious flight, monitored and protected by the Internet. Slovakia’s Lesser Spotted Eagle risked extinction until the Slovak Ministry of Environment and the Tatra National Park launched an ambitious preservation project. Under the seven year old program, young eagles are fitted with transmitters and systematically monitored. This year, we partnered with the Ministry and the National park, offering Google Earth to track an eagle named "Arnold" in an attempt to keep him safe on his its migration route to South Africa.

So far, four million views have been recorded tracking Arnold’s path south into Africa. National television broadcasts weekly updates headlined “Follow the Slovak Eagle.” Earlier this month, the bird vanished near the Kundelungu National Park in Congo. Arnold’s followers became increasingly worried that something bad had happened to him. But after 14 days of silence, Arnold’s transmitter signal reappeared this week from Zambia.



In less than a decade, the preservation project has managed to save 15 Lesser Spotted Eagles and stabilize their total population in Slovakia. Baby eaglets are collected from nests, carefully picked out in advance, when they are approximately five days old, in order to prevent their murder by parents. They then temporarily placed in a Rescue Station where a foster mother takes care of them and feeds them. When the young birds can feed by themselves and regulate their body temperature, they are released into the wild.

Now, thanks to the Internet, they can continue to be followed and protected. The Tatra National Park plans to reach out to other national park administrations in the European Union to speak about their lessons learned and promote the use of the internet in forestry

Posted by Ondrej Socuvka, Policy Manager Google Slovakia