Author: Clinton

It hasn’t taken Google long to bring some great new features to Google Assistant.  After announcing both new voices and customized routines yesterday at Google I/O, both are now live and available.  You can find Routines in the Google Assistant App under Settings>Routines.  There you will find a Floating Action Button (FAB) that will allow you to create a personalize routine for your Assistant.

The customization allows you to tell Google Assistant what to do when you give a particular command.  There are a lot of pre-built command that can be setup with just a couple of taps.

Yesterday at Google I/O it was announced that Google Assistant would be receiving six new voices that you could use to suit your personal preferences with as you interact with it on your phone or Home devices.  Just a day later, those new voice models are now live in the Assistant or Home app on your Android phone.

You can find the new voice models under Settings>Preferences>Assistant Voice.  There you can listen to a script read by each of the voices to pick the one you like the best.  There are three male and three female voices to chose from in addition to the stock male and female voices that have already been in Assistant.

With the release of Developer Preview 2 for Android P yesterday, there was also a new wallpaper amongst all the new features of the build.  The thing is, if you upgraded your phone to DP2 from the Android Beta Program, you didn’t get the new wallpaper… until now.

Thanks to Semih Celik, it is now available for everyone.  Semih posted it on his G+ page yesterday and I have no added it to the wallpaper page here on the site as well as to this post after the break.

After being first released last week, a second Chrome 66 build is now available in the Chrome OS Stable Channel today.  Build 66.0.3359.158 (Platform version: 10452.85.0) is available for most Chrome OS devices starting today and is the build that systems which are capable of running Android apps will be updated to run.

I can confirm that my Google Pixelbook was updated to build .158 earlier this morning when I used the chrome://help command to check for the update.

After months of rumors and commits in Chrome OS development, it was made official at Google I/O yesterday:  Chrome OS will soon natively support Linux apps.  It is a significant step forward for the platform and should bring improved tools to developers on the platform.

During the keynote, where this was almost mentioned as an after thought, Android Studio was highlighted as being one of the apps that will work once this feature rolls out to everyone.

While Google I/O was going on yesterday, the Gmail team announced a new feature that you may have missed.  If you are using the new Gmail experience and Chrome as your browser, you can now configure the mail service to work offline in the browser.

In Settings, there is now a new Offline tab where you can configure things.  You can select the amount of time you want stored locally – 30, 60, 90 days – and then configure the security settings on what to do if you sign out of Chrome.  Save the settings and now you can work offline in Gmail while you are on that flight or elsewhere that WiFi isn’t available.