Google

Apple’s Siri is apparently the market leader for mobile voice assistants, beating out popular players like Google’s Assistant. This may come as a surprise to some, since Android has a much larger share of the market and Siri is often considered inferior in terms of user experience and capabilities. But Google has been struggling to build awareness about its smart assistant (Google Assistant is on 400 million Android devices as of 2017, according to Voicebot.ai) and as this chart from Statista shows, Siri’s first-to-market strategy has made it tough for others to catch up. Also interesting here is Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana’s high rankings, considering neither one is automatically integrated into a smartphone. Alexa’s particularly impressive 10% share accounts for the people who use the voice assistant through the Alexa app in order to access their Echo smart speakers – a capability that wasn’t even possible until 2017. Cortana, … [Read more...] about Siri owns 46% of the mobile voice assistant market — one and half times Google Assistant’s share of the market

If your Google account information isn’t secure then there’s no way it’s private. And if you’ve accidentally made a lot of information public, it doesn’t matter how secure your account is overall. Want to make sure your information is good to go? Google just revamped its “My Account” page to make it even easier for you to double-check that all your settings and securities are up-to-date — and to scope out whether there’s been any suspicious activity on your account. Here’s what the new My Account Page looks like (click here to visit yours). It puts all of Google’s privacy and security tools in one place: Scroll down and you’ll find two of the most useful parts of the page — quick-and-easy security and privacy check-ups you can breeze through in under ten minutes. They will help you figure out how secure your account is and exactly what information you’re sharing with Google, advertisers, and the rest of … [Read more...] about How to make sure your Google account is as private and secure as possible

Larry Page is known for being an ambitious goal-setter – he pushed this mindset on executives throughout his time at Google. Before becoming CEO, he was the president of the products team working closely with then-VP of products management Sundar Pichai, who was overseeing the launch of the Chrome browser. Pichai himself had set very ambitious goals for the launch, having learned the importance of “stretch” goals at the company, but Page stepped in to push the “aggressive goal” even further. The team reached their goal with weeks to spare. In 2008, current Google CEO Sundar Pichai was overseeing the launch of Chrome as part of his role as the vice president of products management, where he worked closely with then-president of products Larry Page. When Chrome launched, Pichai set a fairly ambitious goal to hit 20 million weekly active users within the year. “Candidly, I thought there was no way we would get there,” he recalls in John … [Read more...] about Larry Page has a reputation for pushing people at Google. Here’s how he pushed a young Sundar Pichai to make Google Chrome the top web browser in the world