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Google Calendar is set to pick up some handy new features over the course of the next few days that will allow for Out of Office event creation to be an easier process and to help block out your personal time on your calendar.  The updates are rolling out to all G Suite customers and, presumably, that includes the public version of Google Calendar non-G Suite users use.

A key new feature will be around the event creation pop-up that you get when you select a time or select multiple days.  Based on where you click, you will now see options to create an event, a reminder, or if you select multiple days, to select that it is an Out of Office time for you.

At Google I/O in May, the company demonstrated what was both one of the coolest and most controversial future aspects of Google Assistant.  Using a human sounding voice, referred to as Duplex, Assistant placed a phone call on the users behalf to set an appointment.  The reaction to this has ranged from it being fake all the way around to this being the first indicator of the rise of the machines against humanity.  But the fact is that the technology is there and Google’s AI technology is stunningly powerful.  And it won’t be long before you get to try it yourself.

Google today published a video on their YouTube channel that highlights how Assistant will be able to get things done for you like setting up an appointment or reservation without you having to make the call yourself.  Take a look at the video.

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While we are months away from having this smooth of an interaction, the basic building blocks are there now and public testing has begun.

YouTube is now broadly rolling out the ability for all users, regardless if you are a YouTube Premium subscriber or not, to utilize the app’s support of Android Oreo’s Picture-in-Picture feature.  By all indications, this is a cloud-side change so as long as you are running the latest version of YouTube on your phone (v 13.24.59 for those keeping score at home), you should see the update now or very shortly.

Up to this point, PiP has been limited to YouTube Red previously and now YouTube Premium as a benefit of the paid service.  With this change, assuming that the content creator has given permission for PiP to happen, all YouTube users should be able to utilize the feature.

A third Chrome 67 update has come to the Chrome OS Stable Channel today, bringing further security fixes to the platform as well as a clarification on a security patch.  The update is build 67.0.3396.99 or 67.0.3396.101 (Platform version: 10575.58.0) depending on your device.  It comes two weeks after the second update was released back on June 13.

If your Chromebook is in the Stable Channel, you can check for the update by typing chrome://help in the browser bar and then clicking the Check for update button next to your current build information.  The release of this update happened last yesterday so it could still take a while for everyone to see the update as being available.