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Since we launched Google Docs and Sheets 15 years ago, we’ve been pushing work documents away from being just digital pieces of paper and toward collaborative, linked content inspired by the web. Our mission is to build the future of work, and smart canvas is our next big step. 

Specifically, we’re enhancing the apps that hundreds of millions of people use every day — like Docs, Sheets, and Slides — to transform collaboration and make Google Workspace even more flexible, interactive and intelligent. Between now and the end of the year, we’re rolling out new features that’ll make it easier for you to do your work and collaborate with your teammates, wherever you are. 

Here are 12 new features to help make collaboration even more seamless.

@-mention people, files and meetings

Already available, when you @-mention a person in a document, a smart chip shows you additional information like the person’s location, job title and contact information. And starting now, we’re introducing new smart chips in Docs for recommended files and meetings. To insert smart chips into your work, simply type “@” to see a list of recommended people, files and meetings. From web or mobile, your collaborators can then quickly skim associated meetings and people or preview linked documents, all without changing tabs or contexts. Smart chips will come to Sheets in the coming months.

When artist David Li partnered with Google Arts & Culture on a machine learning experiment in late 2020, he didn’t realize the project would make a return at this week’s I/O. “Opera singers use their voices as expressive and beautiful musical instruments and I was interested in the idea of making interactive versions of these voices, so that anyone could play with them,” he says. At the time, he simply wanted to explore what technology could do with the human voice — but the Blob Opera quickly became a hit.

“I’m definitely not a musician,” says Pamela Peter-Agbia. “I stopped playing piano a very long time ago.” Pamela is a producer for Google, and despite her non-musical background, she’s part of a very special, very experimental musical project: bringing Blob Opera to I/O.

“We were very excited to get the invitation to bring Blob Opera to I/O with new features,” says Laurent Gaveau, who’s the head of Google Arts & Culture lab. Laurent is a musician who studied at a conservatory in France and worked in music for 10 years. “Opera is one of my passions,” he says. “The magic of performing art is one of the most difficult things to grasp from a technical standpoint. So it’s been a pleasure to invite David Li to create this experiment that so playfully guides people to learn more about the voice and music. But we weren’t really expecting how much people would enjoy it when we first introduced Blob Opera.” 

Before the experiment’s initial release in December 2020, the team needed samples of opera voices. They turned to four talented freelance opera singers who went into the recording studio alone for hours at a time, using their voices and talent to unearth a huge range of sounds. They explained it to the singers as teaching a computer to sing. “Imagine trying to create a kind of map of sound with different elements — vowels, consonants, all the different notes — and then bringing it all together to train an algorithm,” Pamela says.  “We fed 16 hours of singing in a Convolutional Neural Network, which learned how to reproduce each voice type based on what it heard,” David explains. In fact, the team created two models: One that taught the computer to sing, and another that taught it to harmonize. The end result being, of course, the Blob Opera.

There was an added bonus to all that time in the studio. “The singers really enjoyed using their voices in a different way — I remember our soprano, Olivia, was excited to see how young people would use this.” 

“Until I saw the Blobs, I couldn’t quite understand it — but when I finally saw it, I loved it!” says Olivia ( whose fiance was the tenor). “The sheet music we received was basically parts of an opera, but all written on one note,” she explains. “So we sang those pieces as one note, in a range of pitches, for hours.” Olivia says that while it could be tricky, she thoroughly enjoyed the process — especially since she’d hardly been able to sing live all year. 

Pamela hardly minded logging hours in the studio with them. “It made me realize how much I miss live music!” 

Fittingly, Blob Opera’s return (which comes with a new look and new features) had its own performance moment on stage with Tune-Yards at Google I/O 2021. Pamela and Laurent mentioned that Tune-Yards’ lead vocalist Merrill Garbus’s voice was a perfect fit for the Blobs’ operatic sounds and that it was incredible to see a real artist working with the blobs as colleagues. 

While the Blob Opera will be a part of the Tune-Yards live performance at I/O, they’ll also be available online, where anyone can interact with it. The interactive Blobs, which have new, colorful styles, can also leave their digital opera house and go on tour to places like Cape Town, London, Mexico City, New York, Paris or Seoul. Each location comes with its own set of traditional, local songs – like “Frére Jacques” or La Bamba. David calls the custom version of Blob Opera, used to create the show, a “massively optimized version.” “We used the new WebAssembly SIMD feature so 16 blobs could all move and sing at the same time,” he says. “It was great to get to push web browsers in this way.”

Laurent says it was a joy to bring the Blobs back in this new way, and both he and Pamela describe the process as one of the smoothest collaborations they’ve worked on. Of course, it’s had something of an effect on them as well. “I have to say, what I’ve found really funny,” Pamela says, “…is that I’m literally eating, sleeping, breathing Tune-Yards and opera songs these days!” 

To learn more about this or other musical experiments — such as AR Synth or Assisted Melody – visit the Google Arts & Culture experiments website or get our free app for Android or iOS to discover more about performing arts.

At a time when the need for access to trustworthy information is critical, we are announcing a slew of investments to support India’s large and diverse news industry. These investments will help people find quality journalism, contribute to the sustainability of news organizations, and expand our programs under the Google News Initiative — enabling newsrooms to engage their readers in new and compelling ways through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Launching Google News Showcase in India 

Today’s announcement comes at a particularly challenging moment in India, with Indians seeking out authoritative news and information as the COVID-19 crisis deepens. To support news organizations and readers, we’re introducing Google News Showcase, our new online experience and licensing program. This program incentivizes and supports news publishers to curate high quality content on Google’s News and Discover platforms, connecting readers with the news they need.

Starting today, Google News Showcase is rolling out in India with 30 news publishers including national, regional and local news organizations like The Hindu Group, HT Digital Streams Ltd, Indian Express Group, ABP LIVE, India TV, NDTV, Zee News, Amar Ujala, Deccan Herald, Punjab Kesari, The Telegraph India, IANS (Indo Asian News Service) and ANI.  This builds on News Showcase deals signed by 700 news publications in more than a dozen countries, including Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the U.K. Australia, Czechia, Italy and Argentina,more than 90% of them representing local or community news — with discussions underway in several other countries. 

This week at the annual RSA Conference, we will hear from industry leaders on a wide range of issues, from the supply chain security crisis to breach disclosure notifications. While it’s important to talk about where we have been and what is happening in the industry right now, it is equally as important to think about where we need to go.

At Google, that means creating a safer Internet that is more secure for the next billion users. 

In order to create a safer Internet, our engineers, technologists and product teams look at what we know today and think about how it will change tomorrow – from analyzing trends in attacker methods, to shifts in the threat landscape, to new technologies – and we use those insights to chart the path ahead. 

We recently asked security experts across Google to telegraph the future of security, here’s a glimpse at their insights:

What do you think the biggest security challenge will be in 10 years?