Lucknow – Google has added a unique touch to the Maha Kumbh 2025 celebrations by featuring a special animation on its search screen that showers virtual petals.

When users search for terms like "Kumbh," "Maha Kumbh," or "Kumbh Mela," a vibrant animation of rose petals falling appears on the screen, bringing the festive spirit to life.

The animation can be shared via email, Facebook, X, or WhatsApp. Users also have the option to replay the animation or dismiss it.

The official Maha Kumbh handle on X posted, “Google is celebrating the commencement of Maha Kumbh 2025 in Prayagraj uniquely. When you search for Maha Kumbh, it honors the event with a petal shower on the screen.”

A Spiritual Gathering of Epic Proportions

The Maha Kumbh is one of the world’s largest spiritual gatherings, held every 12 years at the Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj, where the Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati rivers converge. This year’s grand festival began on January 13 and will continue until February 26.

Millions of Hindu devotees flock to the sacred site, seeking liberation and cleansing of sins by taking holy dips in the waters. Over the first two days alone, nearly five crore pilgrims visited the site. The Uttar Pradesh government, which is hosting the event, anticipates a turnout of 40 to 45 crore visitors over the festival’s duration.

This digital celebration by Google adds to the global recognition of Maha Kumbh, bringing the essence of the event to internet users worldwide.

New Delhi, India - As voting commences for the second phase of Lok Sabha elections across 88 seats in 13 states of India, Google has once again stepped up to motivate voters through an interactive doodle. The doodle features the iconic inked index finger, symbolizing participation in the democratic process.

This initiative follows Google's earlier doodle during the first phase of elections, emphasizing the importance of voting in the 18th Lok Sabha 2024 elections. The doodle serves as a reminder for citizens to exercise their voting rights.

New Delhi, April 19 - Google, the multinational American technology company, marked the commencement of the 18th Lok Sabha elections in India by unveiling a special doodle on Friday, April 19. The doodle, showcased on Google's homepage, features an index finger pointing upward, with ink applied, reminiscent of the act of voting in Indian democracy.

Google's doodle, a unique alteration of its logo, is a rare occurrence and is typically reserved for special occasions such as festivals, holidays, or to commemorate notable individuals' birthdays or death anniversaries.

The Lok Sabha elections, being held in seven phases, are a significant democratic exercise in India. In this election, voters will elect 543 Members of Parliament (MPs) to the Lok Sabha. The first phase of voting, taking place for 102 seats across 21 states and union territories, sets the stage for the subsequent phases. The results of the elections are scheduled to be announced on June 4, 2024.

New Delhi, Feb 2 (IANS) Google, which brought Gemini Pro into its AI chatbot Bard in English last December, has now made it available in more than 230 countries and territories in over 40 languages, including nine Indian languages.

The nine Indian languages include -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, and Urdu.

"The Large Model Systems Organisation, a leading evaluator of language models and chatbots across languages, recently shared that Bard with Gemini Pro is one of the most preferred chatbots available (with or without cost), noting that it has made a “stunning leap” forward," Google said in a blogpost on Thursday.

The company has also expanded its 'double-check feature' in Bard, which is already used by millions of people in English, to more than 40 languages.

"When you click on the 'G' icon, Bard will evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate its response. If it can be evaluated, you can click the highlighted phrases and learn more about supporting or contradicting information found by Search," Google explained.

Moreover, the tech giant now allows users to generate images in Bard in English in most countries around the world, at no cost.

This new capability is powered by the company's updated 'Imagen 2 model' -- designed to balance quality and speed, delivering high-quality, photorealistic outputs.

Users will just need to type in a description -- like "create an image of a dog riding a surfboard" -- and Bard will generate custom, wide-ranging visuals to help bring their idea to life.

"Our technical guardrails and investments in the safety of training data seek to limit violent, offensive or sexually explicit content. Additionally, we apply filters designed to avoid the generation of images of named people," the tech giant noted.

Google also mentioned to continue investing in new techniques to improve the safety and privacy protections of their models.

New Delhi, Jan 24 (IANS) The Delhi High Court has issued a directive asking Google to suspend URLs associated with various Google Forms inviting the public to apply for a 'Starbucks Franchise'.

Justice Anish Dayal said that Starbucks, which has filed the suit, is authorised to file an affidavit listing similar URLs of Google Forms. Google is then expected to suspend those URLs upon receiving the information.

Starbucks, which has gone against unidentified entities falsely claiming to be its franchisees, reiterated that an interim injunction had been granted in favour of Starbucks in April of the previous year.

The fresh application aims to restrain impostors who were posing as 'Starbucks Franchise' through Google Forms.

Notably, Starbucks, the multinational coffeehouse chain, does not operate on a franchise model in India.

"Counsel for the plaintiffs, therefore, states that the imposters are seeking information from general public to apply for Starbucks Franchise opportunities, which as noted above does not exist in India," the court noted.

These fraudulent forms, with headings such as 'StarBucks franchise', misled individuals into believing they could apply for Starbucks franchises in India.

The court affirmed Starbucks' entitlement to relief, citing concerns about the misuse of Google Forms by impostors to gather information related to a nonexistent Starbucks franchise in India.

Additionally, the court stressed the impropriety of seeking private information and data from the general public through such deceptive means.

It noted: "In the opinion of this Court, the plaintiffs would be entitled to the relief they seek in this application, on account of not only that these Google Forms are being posted by imposters in order to elicit information relating to Starbucks franchise (which do not exist in India) as well as seeking private information and data from the general public, which cannot be countenanced."

Justice Dayal concluded that if Google has reservations about specific URLs, they can respond to Starbucks, and if necessary, approach the court for further adjudication and relief.

New Delhi, Jan 21 (IANS) Google has introduced new ways to make it even easier to unsubscribe from unwanted emails in Gmail on the web and mobile.

The tech giant has now added the unsubscribe button to the hover actions in the thread list on the web.

"When the unsubscribe button is clicked, Gmail sends http request or an email to the sender to remove your email address from their mailing list," Google said in a blogpost.

On mobile, the company moved the unsubscribe button from the three-dot menu to appear more prominently in your email on your Android and iOS devices.

The company said that these features are now available to all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google Accounts on web and iOS devices and are rolling out now on Android devices at an extended pace.

Since people receive unwanted messages from brands and organisations despite initially signing up that often originate from legitimate senders and marking them as spam can negatively impact those senders' email, the company has revised the text of its buttons so users can choose between unsubscribing or reporting a message as spam more clearly.

"We're changing the text of the buttons to make it clearer for users to choose between unsubscribing or reporting a message as spam," Google said.

Meanwhile, Google has added a new feature in Maps that will let users navigate in tunnels or other satellite dead zones.

The company added support for 'Bluetooth beacons' and has rolled out widely on Google Maps for Android, however, it still missing in the iOS version of the app, reports 9to5Google.

New Delhi, Jan 17 (IANS) Google India Digital Services Out Ltd on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), to expand the transformative impact of UPI to countries beyond India.

The pact seeks to broaden the use of UPI payments for travellers outside of India, enabling them to conveniently make transactions abroad.

The MoU also intends to assist in establishing UPI-like digital payment systems in other countries, providing a model for seamless financial transactions. Also, it focuses on easing the process of remittances between countries by utilising the UPI infrastructure, thereby simplifying cross-border financial exchanges, the tech giant said in a statement.

“Google Pay has been a proud and willing collaborator to NPCI and the financial ecosystem, under the regulator’s guidance, and this collaboration is another step towards our commitment to making payments simple, safe and convenient,” said Deeksha Kaushal, Director, Partnerships, Google Pay India.

The goal is to provide foreign merchants access to Indian customers who will no longer have to rely only on foreign currency and/or, credit or forex cards for making digital payments and will have the option using UPI powered Apps from India including Google Pay.

Moreover, the MoU will also significantly contribute to simplifying remittances by reducing dependence on conventional money transfer channels.

“This strategic partnership will not only simplify foreign transactions for Indian travelers but will also allow us to extend our knowledge and expertise of operating a successful digital payments ecosystem to other countries,” said Ritesh Shukla, CEO – NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL).

New Delhi, Jan 5 (IANS) The Google DeepMind robotics team has introduced new AI-based systems based on large language models (LLMs) to help develop better multi-tasking robots for our daily use.

The tech giant unveiled AutoRT, SARA-RT and RT-Trajectory systems to improve real-world robot data collection, speed, and generalisation.

“We’re announcing a suite of advances in robotics research that bring us a step closer to this future. AutoRT, SARA-RT, and RT-Trajectory build on our historic Robotics Transformers work to help robots make decisions faster, and better understand and navigate their environments,” the Google DeepMind team said in a statement.

AutoRT harnesses the potential of large foundation models which is critical to creating robots that can understand practical human goals.

By collecting more experiential training data AutoRT can help scale robotic learning to better train robots for the real world, said the team, said Google.

AutoRT combines large foundation models such as a LLM or a Visual Language Model (VLM), and a robot control model (RT-1 or RT-2) to create a system that can deploy robots to gather training data in novel environments.

“In extensive real-world evaluations over seven months, the system safely orchestrated as many as 20 robots simultaneously, and up to 52 unique robots in total, in a variety of office buildings, gathering a diverse dataset comprising 77,000 robotic trials across 6,650 unique tasks,” the team informed.

The Self-Adaptive Robust Attention for Robotics Transformers (SARA-RT) system converts Robotics Transformer (RT) models into more efficient versions.

“The best SARA-RT-2 models were 10.6 per cent more accurate and 14 per cent faster than RT-2 models after being provided with a short history of images. We believe this is the first scalable attention mechanism to provide computational improvements with no quality loss,” said the DeepMind team.

When the team applied SARA-RT to a state-of-the-art RT-2 model with billions of parameters, it resulted in faster decision-making and better performance on a wide range of robotic tasks.

Another model called RT-Trajectory hich automatically adds visual outlines that describe robot motions in training videos.

RT-Trajectory takes each video in a training dataset and overlays it with a 2D trajectory sketch of the robot arm’s gripper as it performs the task.

“These trajectories, in the form of RGB images, provide low-level, practical visual hints to the model as it learns its robot-control policies,” said Google.

When tested on 41 tasks unseen in the training data, an arm controlled by RT-Trajectory more than doubled the performance of existing state-of-the-art RT models: it achieved a task success rate of 63 per cent compared with 29 per cent for RT-2.

“RT-Trajectory can also create trajectories by watching human demonstrations of desired tasks, and even accept hand-drawn sketches. And it can be readily adapted to different robot platforms,” according to the team.

San Francisco, Dec 19 (IANS) Google is adding a new option in Play Store, which will let users uninstall apps from their other Android devices remotely.

According to the Google System Updates changelog, the Play Store is now rolling out a new option for removing apps from "other connected" Android devices, reports 9to5Google.

Google only provides a brief explanation, but it does state that it is supported across all instances of Android (Auto, PC, Phone, TV, and Wear).

"(Auto, PC, Phone, TV, Wear) New feature to help you uninstall apps on connected devices," Google said.

Google's new remote uninstall feature is hidden beneath the surface of the Play Store's version 38.8 (which has not yet been widely distributed).

After enabling the feature, the Play Store's "Manage Apps" section can display apps installed on a different Android device from the one you're currently using, and the app can be deleted from the other device from that UI, the report explained.

The feature also allows you to arrange the list of apps installed on your other devices by storage used, the report added.

Meanwhile, Google has introduced more repair features for Pixel devices that will give users peace of mind if their phone needs to be fixed. The tech giant released a tool to help users diagnose problems with their Pixel phones.

Users can launch the app by dialling #*#7287#*#, which allows users to check whether their phone is working properly before or after a repair.

San Francisco, Dec 9 (IANS) Google is mulling to create a bird’s-eye view of users’ lives using their phone data, photos and searches and then applying AI technology, the media reported.

Titled “Project Ellmann,” the idea is to use large language models (LLMs) like latest Gemini model to utilise search results, find patterns in a user’s photos, create a chatbot and “answer previously impossible questions,” reports CNBC.

“Project Ellman is just one of many ways Google is proposing to create or improve its products with AI technology,” the report mentioned.

Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos.

“Project Ellmann” could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user’s photos more deeply than “just pixels with labels and metadata”>

“We can’t answer tough questions or tell good stories without a bird’s-eye view of your life,” according to the project.

“We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment. When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear,” according to the project presentation.

“With ‘Ellmann Chat,’ imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?”

A Google spokesperson said that Google Photos has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and “we’re excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences”.

“This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users’ privacy and safety as our top priority,” the spokesperson added.

Google this week introduced Gemini, its most capable and general model yet with state-of-the-art performance across many leading benchmarks.

In the coming months, Gemini will be available in more of Google products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome and Duet AI.

According to Google, Gemini 1.0’s sophisticated multimodal reasoning capabilities can help make sense of complex written and visual information.

San Francisco, Dec 8 (IANS) Google launched its new AI model called Gemini with much fanfare but a company video titled "Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI" which hit more than 1.5 million views in just a day may have been "pretty much faked", a report claimed on Friday.

The video demo of Gemini shows a series of carefully tuned text prompts with still images, “clearly selected and shortened to misrepresent what the interaction is actually like”, reports The Verge.

“On one hand, Gemini really does appear to have generated the responses shown in the video. But viewers are misled about the speed, accuracy, and fundamental mode of interaction with the model,” the report claimed.

Google said the video “shows real outputs from Gemini and “we made a few edits to the demo”.

Parmy Olsen at Bloomberg posted on X: "PSA about Google’s jaw-dropping video demo of Gemini - the one with the duck”.

“It was not carried out in real time or in voice. The model was shown still images from video footage and human prompts narrated afterwards, per a spokesperson,” she said.

Oriol Vinyals, Google DeepMind’s VP of Research, posted on X that he is happy to see the interest around “Hands-on with Gemini” video.

“We gave Gemini sequences of different modalities -- image and text in this case -- and had it respond by predicting what might come next”.

“All the user prompts and outputs in the video are real, shortened for brevity. The video illustrates what the multimodal user experiences built with Gemini could look like. We made it to inspire developers,” he said.

Google on Wednesday spiced up the generative AI race with introducing Gemini, its most capable and general model yet with state-of-the-art performance across many leading benchmarks, in three iterations.

The first version, Gemini 1.0, is optimised for different sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano.

Google’s AI chatbot Bard will use a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro for more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding and more.

It will be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories, and “we plan to expand to different modalities and support new languages and locations in the near future,” said Google.

The company also brought Gemini to Pixel 8 Pro, powering new features like Summarise in the Recorder app and rolling out Smart Reply in Gboard, starting with WhatsApp, with more messaging apps coming next year.

In the coming months, Gemini will be available in more of Google products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome and Duet AI.

New Delhi, Nov 30 (IANS) Google on Thursday announced Play Store's best apps and games of 2023 in India, which helped people through a range of critical needs.

"In 2023, once again, we saw many new and exciting apps helping people through a range of critical needs, with self-care, personal growth, and e-commerce apps dominating app innovations on our list this year," Google said in a blogpost.

The winner of the Best App of the Year is "Level SuperMind", which is helping people improve their mindfulness with personalised AI-enabled paths comprising a mix of meditation, exercises, journals, and sleep stories.

The winners of the Best App with AI category are -- Stimuler, which is helping people improve their English speaking skills with AI-powered voice technology, and SwiftChat, which uses conversational AI chatbots to assist students and teachers with personalised learning content in multiple Indian languages.

Therapy app -- THAP: Your Happiness Gym won the users’ choice app of the year in India.

The app helps people improve their mental well-being and manage issues such as depression, anxiety, and stress, with easy access to resources and licensed therapists.

In personal growth, Infinity Learn and upGrad are catering to e-learning needs with high-quality and engaging learning avenues, and AmbitionBox is helping people make more informed career decisions, Google mentioned.

In the gaming category, the Best Game of the year won by "Monopoly Go".

The tech giant said this game "captured India’s fascination for multiplayer board games with the introduction of new and exciting boards, characters, and events, across the year".

Indian players also showered their love for the adventures of the Subway Surfers crew, with Subway Surfers Blast winning the users’ choice game award.

Mighty Doom, a winner in the Best Pick Up & Play category, reignited the legacy of the Doom franchise, bringing its iconic demon-slaying action right into the hands of gamers.

Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) captured the interest of the gaming community with a host of new updates, such as an all-new NUSA map and integration of Dragon Super Ball characters, making it one of Google Play's winners in the Best Ongoing Game category.

Sports game EA SPORTS FC Mobile Soccer also found a spot in the Best Ongoing Game category, mirroring the growing popularity of sports titles among Indian gamers.

"It gives us immense joy to see local developers of all sizes leverage the potential of reaching over 2.5 billion monthly active users in 190 markets on Google Play, and building winning solutions for India and the world," Google said.