Google's Portrait Light feature can make some of your more mediocre photos look a lot better by giving you a way to change their lighting direction and intensity. The tech giant launched the AI-based lighting feature in September for the Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5 before giving older Pixel phones access to it. Now, Google has published a post on its AI blog explaining the technology behind Portrait Light, including how it trained its machine learning models. To be able to train one of those models to add lighting to a photo from a certain direction, Google needed millions of portraits with and without extra lighting from different directions. The company used a spherical lighting rig with 64 cameras and 331 individually programmable LED light sources to capture the photos it needed.

I scrambled for my phone. I was on hold for only five minutes, but for the first time, I didn't need to put my ears through terrible hold music. It has a unique feature that uses the artificially-intelligent Google Assistant to monitor when you've been put on hold with a 1-800 number. You'll hear a loud chime when you're finally connected to a human, so there's no need to attentively sit with the phone in hand and listen to Kenny G for hours on end. It's small, helpful features like this that make me appreciate Google phones.

Hold music could one day be a thing of the past thanks to a service coming to Google's smartphones. Hold for Me, which launches on Thursday in the US for owners of Google's Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a phones, involves Google's AI tools taking over as an automatic secretary when on hold to a call centre, leaving the user free to put down the phone and carry on with their life. The service will listen out for when the call is picked up and send a notification when it's time for the user to get back on the phone. In the meantime, Google's assistant will ask the call centre to hold, hopefully stopping them from hanging up because of dead air. "Every business's hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes on to the call," Google's Andrew Goodman and Joseph Cherukara said.

Google unveiled its Pixel 5 phone Wednesday, and there's a lot to unpack. Right off the bat, it doesn't have the latest Snapdragon processor, it doesn't have a 1440p display, and it dumps the vaunted Soli radar that powered Motion Sense and Face Unlock. But there are a few other tidbits we've learned since the Launch Night in event that you might have missed: One of the reasons why the Pixel phones have such great cameras is because of their tremendous on-device AI abilities. On previous phones, that was due to specialized co-processors that work with the main chip to quickly process AI-related tasks. On the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3, the Pixel Visual Core handled those tasks, while the Pixel 4 introduced the Pixel Neural Core for handling photo processing, live transcriptions, and the new Google Assistant.

Hold music could one day be a thing of the past, thanks to a service coming to Google's smartphones. "Hold For Me", which launches on Thursday in the US for owners of Google's Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a phones, involves Google's AI tools taking over as an automatic secretary when on hold to a call centre, leaving the user free to put the phone down and carry on with their life. The service will automatically listen out for when the call is picked up, and send a notification when it's time for the user to get back on the phone. In the meantime, Google's assistant will ask the call centre to hold, hopefully stopping them from hanging up because of dead air. "Every business's hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes on to the call," Google's Andrew Goodman and Joseph Cherukara said.

Google didn't just cater to Android fans with the Pixel 5 and 4a 5G at its Launch Night In event -- it also introduced a brand new Photos editor for Android that aims to improve snapshots for everyone, not just those with the latest devices. The new Google Photos editor uses machine learning to suggest changes to pictures that you can apply with one tap. Some are simple touch-ups like Enhance, while others are flashy effects like Black and White Portrait or Color Pop. You can often see the specific changes made to a photo if you want to tweak the results. You might be happy if you prefer manual edits.

One week after Amazon rolled out their new line of Echo and Fire TV devices, Google announced slew of new devices, including the much-anticipated Pixel 5. Also new for 2020 is the completely redesigned Nest smart speaker, Nest Audio, and an upgraded Chromecast (now with Google TV). We're just as excited as you are to play with Google's new gadgets, but first to the important details. Here's everything you need to know about Google's new hardware--and how to pre-order before it all sells out. The Pixel 5 comes with wireless and reverse wireless charging, so you can use it to power up your Pixel Buds when you're on-the-go. Brand new to the Pixel lineup is Google's Pixel 5. It's water resistant, comes with 8GB of RAM, and a new ultra-wide lens on the back.

Android's machine learning renaissance is coming to the Photos app, company executives announced during Wednesday's gloriously brief Pixel 5 live stream event. To start, Google plans to augment its already useful image auto-enhance feature with machine learning algorithms that can further improve those enhancements based on the specific image you're working on. Users will be able to apply brightness, contrast and portrait effects with a single tap to start with Enhance and Color Pop filters being rolled out in a few months. And for photographers that prefer to edit their shots manually, Google reorganized the editor layout into a scrollable bar across the bottom of the screen. The company is also offering an AI-based lighting feature, dubbed Portrait Light, that can apply varying levels and differing positions of light and shadow to a photo you've already taken.

Google has announced four new additions to its own-brand hardware line including two new Pixel smartphones, a new Chromecast and Nest Audio smart speaker. The Pixel 5 is Google's new top phone, which slots in above the well received but heavily delayed Pixel 4a and the new Pixel 4a 5G, which also launches today. Announced during a live-streamed event, the new Pixel 5 replaces the Pixel 4 with a cheaper, simplified design, ditching its face recognition system for the older fingerprint scanner mounted in the back of the device. The new phone has a 6in 90Hz OLED screen with a selfie camera poking through a hole in the top left and a dual-camera setup with wide and ultra-wide lenses on the back, but no optical telephoto zoom camera. Differing from top-spec rivals, the Pixel 5 has Qualcomm's Snapdragon 765G mid-range processor, rather than the Snapdragon 865 used in the latest Samsung and OnePlus phones.

Google's next Pixel phone may do away with one of its predecessor's key features. According to 9to5Google, which cited sources from Google in a recent podcast, the tech giant may forego the inclusion of its Soli radar chip in its upcoming Pixel 5. Using radar, the chip enables features like hand gestures that allow users to control their device from a distance. In yesterday's show, we also touched on some things we're hearing about Pixel 5 from sources -- specifically that it will likely leave behind hobbies like Soli Specifically Soli-enabled users are able to wave a hand over phones to change music, take a call, interact with digital avatars and more. The chip will also be used to predict certain actions before users even tell the phone to carry them out. For instance, if the Pixel 4's alarm is going off, the phone will automatically quiet the ring once it senses a hand coming to shut it off.