Google has rolled out updates for Search with the intention of making explicit deepfakes as hard to find as possible. As part of its long-standing and ongoing fight against realistic-looking manipulated images, the company is making it easier for people to get non-consensual fake imagery that features them removed from Search. It has long been possible for users to request for the removal of those kinds of images under Google's policies. Now, whenever it grants someone's removal request, Google will also filter all explicit results on similar searches about them. The company's systems will scan for any duplicates of the offending image and remove them, as well.

Google Assistant is already pretty handy, filling in your payment info on take out orders, helping get the kids to school on time, controlling your stereo systems' volume and your home's smart light schedules. At its I/O 2022 keynote today, company executives showed off some of the new features arriving soon for the AI. The first of these is "Look and Talk." Instead of having to repeatedly start your requests to Assistant with "Hey Google," this new feature relies on computer vision and voice matching to constantly pay attention to the user. As Sissie Hsiao, Google's VP of Assistant, explained on stage, all the user has to do is look at their Nest Hub Max and state their request.

Teachable Machine is an experiment from Google to bring a no-code and low-code approach to training AI models. Anyone with a modern browser and webcam can quickly train a model with no prior knowledge or experience with AI. Teachable Machine is not exactly new. It was initially launched in 2017 and got revamped in 2019 with additional capabilities, including saving the model to Google Drive and exporting it to other applications. The community behind the project is continuously making it better. It has become so popular that education researcher Blakeley H. Payne and her teammates have been using Teachable Machine as part of an open-source curriculum that teaches middle-schoolers about AI through a hands-on learning experience.

While news podcasts are increasingly popular, most focus on national and global news. It tends to be harder to find local news, especially in an on-demand, audio format. Google wants to change this. Today, it announced plans to bring Your News Update to Google Podcasts and to make it easier to listen to local news via Google Assistant. If you subscribe to Your News Update in the Google Podcasts app, Google will offer a mix of short news stories based on your interests, location, user history and preferences.

Google is going to invest up to $10 billion in India over the next five to seven years, CEO Sundar Pichai announced today. The news came as part of Google's annual Google for India event in which the search giant makes announcements specific to that market. This year's headline is the launch of the Google for India Digitization Fund, which will distribute the $10 billion in investments of the next near-decade. Pichai said that the fund will make money available for equity investment in local tech businesses, partnerships and infrastructure spending. They will be focused around four broad categories, including language-services (India has 22 officially-recognized local languages as well as English), helping Indian businesses embrace digitization, and tailoring products to suit India's specific needs.

Google will make its video game streaming service Stadia free for two months while many around the world are living under restrictive shutdown policies. People who register new accounts will have access to Stadia Pro games and services, which allows users to play video games via stream on a laptop, tablet, smartphone, or equipped television. People who already subscribe to Stadia Pro will have their monthly subscription fees waived during the free two month period. The free two months will run through June 8, after which all accounts will be required to pay a monthly subscription fee of $10. The free promotion is available in 14 countries, according to a report in Engadget, including the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.

Google today announced a small but nifty feature for the Google Assistant and its smart home devices that makes it easier for you to take your music and videos with you as you wander about the different rooms in your home. 'Stream transfer' as Google prosaically calls it, allows you to simply ask the Assistant to move your music to a different speaker, or -- if you have the right speaker group set up -- to all speakers and TVs in your home. All you have to say is "Hey Google, move the music to the bedroom speaker," for example. In addition to your voice, you can also use the Google Home app or the touchscreen on your Google Nest Home Hub. This will work with any source that can play to your Chromecast-enabled speakers and displays. It's all pretty straightforward -- to the point where I'm surprised it took so long for Google to enable a feature like this.

Google on Tuesday is rolling out a new tool that makes it easier for mobile developers to incorporate machine learning into their apps. Google and Microsoft outline their roadmaps and advances for developers. Don't be surprised if the two tech giants' AI-infused visions rhyme. The launch of the machine learning SDK -- called ML Kit -- comes on the first day of the annual Google I/O conference, where the tech giant is once again stressing that AI is at the core of its business. "ML Kit is our way to bring a lot of Google's machine learning technologies that we've developed over many years into a single, easy-to-use package," Brahim Elbouchikhi, Google's ML lead for Android, said to ZDNet.

If you've been wanting to dig into artificial intelligence on a personal level, then you have probably been considering one of Google's AIY kits. These allow STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) audiences to engage in simple projects with a relatively low investment. Now, Google has made things even easier by creating bundles that include the requisite Raspberry Pi single-board computers. The AIY products have two versions aimed at two A.I. applications. There is the AIY Vision Kit that allows experimenting with image recognition and neural networks and the AIY Voice Kit that combines voice recognition and the Google Assistant.

Last week Google announced that it will be making its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) courses available to everyone. In order to help, everyone understands how AI can solve challenging problems and to make learning resources available, Google has created a new platform called Learn with Google AI. Zuri Kemp, who leads Google's machine learning education effort, wrote in a blog post that the aim of this initiative is making AI and its benefits accessible to everyone. "Part of Google AI's mission is to help anyone interested in machine learning succeed -- from researchers to developers and companies, to students," wrote Kemp. Learn with Google AI website provides ways to learn about core ML concepts, develop and hone ML skills, and apply ML to real-world problems.