App Engine team appearances Winter 2011

The Google App Engine team has launched some significant features recently, including: High Replication Datastore, Channel API, Always On, Warm Up requests, longer 10-minute (vs. 30-second) limit for tasks, and increased API call sizes. We are excited about these features and think you will be too, so team members will be appearing at a variety of events around the world this Winter to talk about some of these features and the platform as a whole!

One of the marquee events this quarter includes
PyCon, the largest gathering of Python developers from around the world, where several App Engine team members will be speaking:

• Brett Slatkin will talk about the Pipeline API distributed workflow manager


• Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, will do his BDFL Q&A


• Wesley Chun will discuss running Django apps on App Engine


• Both Wesley & Ikai Lan will lead a half-day Google App Engine workshop tutorial


• (Planned) OpenSpace session: Fireside Chat with Google App Engineers

Winter 2011 event appearances:

• Jan 18 - ICT Meet Ethiopia 2011 - Addis Ababa - Richard Ngamita


• Jan 22 - Google Hackathon (Year One Labs) - Montréal - Sean Lynch


• Feb 1-3 - Strata - Santa Clara - Patrick Chanezon


• Feb 14-16 - Jfokus - Stockholm - Patrick Chanezon


• Feb 17-18 - Developer Summit - Tokyo - Takashi Matsuo


• Feb 28-Mar 4 - Game Developers Conference - San Francisco - Ikai Lan, Alfred Fuller


• Mar 7-10 - CloudConnect - Santa Clara - Chris Schalk


• Mar 9-17 - PyCon - Atlanta - Guido van Rossum, Wesley Chun, Ikai Lan, Brett Slatkin, Alfred Fuller


• Mar 11-15 - SXSW - Austin - Sean Lynch, Greg D'alesandre


• Mar 28-31 - Int'l WWW Conference - Hyderabad - Patrick Chanezon, Rajdeep Dua

If these aren't close enough to you, keep an eye out on this list as we'll add new events as they materialize. There is also a separate calendar for events featuring other Google products/APIs. For App Engine, look for posts like this throughout the year. We look forward to meeting you in 2011!

Posted by Wesley Chun, Google App Engine team

A new look for Google Translate for Android

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Translate Blog.)

When we launched the first version of Google Translate for Android in January 2010, we were excited about the year ahead. For the first time, we were bringing the capabilities supported on Google Translate—like machine translation, romanization of non-Roman scripts and spoken translations—to the Android platform. We also offered voice input to let you speak the word or phrase you wanted to translate instead of typing it in, and SMS translation so you could translate SMS messages sent to you in foreign languages.

Today, we’re refreshing Translate for Android with several updates to make the app easier to interact with. Among other improvements, we’ve created better dropdown boxes to help select the languages you want to translate from and into, an improved input box, and cleaner icons and layout.

We also want to let you in on an experimental feature that’s still in its earliest stages—Conversation Mode. This is a new interface within Google Translate that’s optimized to allow you to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. You may have seen an early demo a few months ago, and today you can try it yourself on your Android device.

Currently, you can only use Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish. In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. Even with these caveats, we’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages.

As Android devices have spread across the globe, we’ve seen Translate for Android used all over. The majority of our usage now comes from outside the United States, and we’ve seen daily usage from more than 150 countries, from Malaysia to Mexico to Mozambique. It’s really rewarding for us to see how this new platform is helping us break down language barriers the world over.

Translate supports 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and voice input for 15 languages. You can download the application, available for devices running Android 2.1 and above, by searching for “Google Translate” in Android Market or by scanning the QR Code below.


Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager