Speech recognition works for 80 languages. It is possible to recognize speech live through a microphone or audio from files (probably up to 2 minutes). Multiple formats are supported, including FLAC, AMR and PCMU.

It is now possible to embed, for example, voice control for any program via the Cloud Speech API. The system outputs recognized text instantly in the process.

Google says that the Speech API is accurate enough to work even with noisy backgrounds, so the material doesn’t need to be pre-cleaned by processing with filters or using expensive noise-canceling equipment and microphones.

Automatic filtering of unwanted content is supported for some languages.

Rumors about the opening of the interfaces have been circulating for the past few weeks. Experts expressed the opinion that Google is going to enter the market, where now works Nuance and some other companies specializing in speech recognition. Now it will be hard for them to compete with Google, its system uses the latest developments in self-learning neural networks, the same engine used in Google’s voice search and voice typing from Google’s keyboard. With each passing month, the Cloud Speech API will recognize text more and more accurately.

The company announced the news about the Cloud Speech API yesterday at the NEXT conference. In addition to speech recognition, developers now have access to the Cloud Machine Learning platform.

The opening of Google API for speech recognition will hit not only the specialized companies, but also Apple, whose Siri voice assistant is significantly inferior to Google’s neural network in terms of recognition accuracy and functionality.

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For Android, there are already many sleep tracking apps that use their own algorithms to determine whether the user is asleep or already awake. If there are several apps running on a user’s device with similar functions, they waste a lot of battery power; moreover, different algorithms lead to unreliable and inconsistent sleep tracking.

The Sleep API solves this problem. It uses readings from the device’s light and motion sensors and processes the data using artificial intelligence. The interface is designed to save developers from having to “spend precious time combining data to determine when a user is asleep or awake.”

According to the company’s plans, the Android Sleep API will help reduce power consumption and optimize app performance. The interface will be built into the Android Activity Recognition software package. Activity tracking will only be available after the user confirms it.

Android Sleep API was developed in collaboration with the creator of Don’t Kill My App! According to 9to5google, the new API is available on Android 10 and later and can already be used by developers. The company also plans to continue working on this API in the future.

The Android Sleep API is already in use in the Sleep as Android app. The service tracks the duration, phases and regularity of sleep and other parameters. The application is available in the Google Play Store.

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The getInstalledRelatedApps API has been under development since 2015. Chrome 59 introduced it as an experiment. The API allows developers to determine if their app is installed on the user’s device and, for example, avoid displaying one notification twice.

Experts, however, point out that getInstalledRelatedApps is designed more in the interests of developers, and when used incorrectly, it poses a threat to user data security and privacy. If a resource owner can use getInstalledRelatedApps to figure out what apps are installed on a device, they can use that information for their own purposes. An even greater threat is that attackers could generate targeted phishing emails or hack the device through app vulnerabilities if they receive this information.

Daniel Bratell, a developer of the Opera browser, wondered if the API was that necessary: “The mobile web already suffers from hard attempts to force Web users to replace their use of sites with apps, and this looks like an attempt to redirect them from the opennet to closed ecosystems.”

Ryan Canso, Google’s specs editor and engineer, confirmed that the API is being developed more for companies, “While it’s not the kind of API that will directly benefit users, they will indirectly benefit from using it because of the improved web interface.”

Google engineer Yoav Weiss later entered the discussion to express concern about the privacy implications of the API: “Knowing that certain apps have been installed could contain valuable and potentially sensitive information about the user: income level, relationship status, sexual orientation, etc.”

Peter Snyder, privacy researcher at browser maker Brave, expressed concern that getInstalledRelatedApps could be used to fingerprint users. “If I represent a company with a lot of apps (like Google), with 16-32 apps registered in the stores, a subset of apps installed by any user would probably be a very strong semi-identifier, which carries a risk for device fingerprinting, wouldn’t it?”

Kanso responded that the specification includes mechanisms to prevent abuse — for example, apps and Web sites must declare associations with each other, so a third-party Web site can’t query another company’s apps on a device for the purpose of analyzing or fingerprinting the device.

However, publishers are making efforts to loosen the restrictions. An engineer at PayPal said the payment processor wants to be able to launch its own app with a Web payment button that’s in an iframe. Matt Juka, a Google engineer, responding to the suggestion, said, “It’s a little scary to extend the API from ‘any site you visit to see if it has an embedded app’ to ‘any site embedded in a site you visit to see if it has an embedded app. Weiss, for his part, warned that providing access to third-party frames can lead to abuse: “For example, many apps can be associated with adprovider.example (for a fee), which will give 3P frames AdProvider access to a lot of personal information about the user (such as what devices they purchased and installed the app for), as well as fingerprint data.”

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In a recent audit Google found that third-party developers successfully use these features in their browser versions to integrate with Google services. In doing so, they are effectively abusing the Chrome Sync service and storing data, bookmarks, and browsing history on Google’s servers without permission. As of mid-March, these Google API services will only be available in the Chrome browser.

If users of Chromium-based browsers have previously logged into their Google Account from them and stored their personal data there, they will be able to continue to manage it on the My Google Activity page or download it using Google Takeout (Google Archivator).

In early 2019, it announced new APIs in Chromium. A month later, Google abandoned planned changes to the Chromium browser API, which made most ad blockers and some other extensions non-functional.

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