We’re building a Google for all of us to build helpful products for everyone

We’re committed to creating tools that make it easier for everyone to accomplish important everyday tasks – like having conversations, getting work done, and enjoying entertainment. Here are some examples across Android and Pixel:

• Guided Frame, a Pixel accessibility feature that helps people with blindness, low vision, and dexterity-related disabilities take selfies and group photos with more ease
• Lookout, an Android feature that helps people with visual impairments get descriptions of the physical world using their phone's camera and ask follow-up questions by voice or keyboard
• Reading mode on Android, a more accessible reading experience designed for and with people with low vision, blindness, and dyslexia
• Magnifier, a camera-based app for seeing things with detail up close, designed in collaboration with trusted partners at the Royal National Institute of Blind People and National Federation of the Blind
• Sound notifications on Android, a helpful feature that detects and notifies people of critical household sounds, like smoke alarms, doorbells, or crying babies, specifically designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing
• Live Transcribe, a no-cost Android service that provides automatic captions in more than 70 languages to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing participate in conversations
• Conversation mode for Pixel phones, which uses on-device machine learning to help anyone better hear conversations in loud environments by tuning out competing noise
  

Learn more about accessibility and disability inclusion across our Android and Pixel products here.

When we can’t experience technology in our language, it limits what we can learn, what jobs we can have, what stories we can share, and so much more. That’s why we’re using AI to make the internet and digital tools more accessible and useful for speakers of all languages, all around the world. Here are some of the ways we’re doing it:

• In 2022, we announced the 1,000 Languages Initiative, an ambitious commitment to build an AI model that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages and bring greater inclusion to billions of people in marginalized communities all around the world.
• We’ve built a language model for Bambara, one of West Africa's most widely spoken languages, to make the world’s information more accessible to its speakers.
• We’ve added support for additional languages across many AI-powered products and features, including Live Caption, Google Translate, and Gemini.

We’re building tools that make it easier to support businesses that represent and support a range of different communities. Business owners in the U.S. can add attributes to their Business Profiles that customers can see in their listings on Google Search and Google Maps. So people can see if businesses are veteran-owned, women-owned, disabled-owned, LGBTQ+ owned, Asian-owned, Black-owned, Latino-owned, Indigenous-owned, wheelchair-accessible, and LGBTQ-friendly.

Historically, image-based technologies have not been designed for people of all skin tones, leading to subpar experiences for people with darker skin.

In 2022, we took steps to address this problem by openly releasing the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale, an alternative 10-shade scale developed by professor and sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk that’s more representative than the current tech industry standard. We’re now using the MST Scale to develop better face detection, camera, and image editing products, building on advances we introduced in 2021 with Real Tone. The MST Scale is also helping us create more representative search experiences for everyone. For example, when people search the web for images, they now see an option to further refine their results by skin tone – making it easier for every individual to find what’s useful and relevant to them.

Moving forward, the MST Scale will continue to help us build products and features that reflect and serve everyone.

AI can help doctors and patients detect diseases earlier, so it has the potential to improve screening for breast cancer – the most common cancer in women worldwide. We’ve partnered with researchers in the U.S. and U.K. to discover how AI can increase the accuracy and efficiency of mammography programmes, reducing the time to diagnosis and improving the patient experience. We’re also working with Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (CGMH) in Taiwan to learn whether our AI models can help with early detection of breast cancer using ultrasound.

Beyond screening and monitoring, we’re researching ways that AI can support and inform the treatment of breast cancer and other diseases across the globe. For example, we’ve partnered with Mayo Clinic to develop an AI system that can help doctors reduce planning time and improve the efficiency of radiotherapy, a common cancer treatment.

Every year, 250,000 service members transition out of the military. United States service members can now enter their military occupation code (MOS, AFSC, NEC, etc.) when they search “jobs for Veterans” and find relevant jobs that align with their military experience — making the civilian career shift easier.