Learn about Google Translate in Coffee with a Googler

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Over the past few months, we’ve been bringing you Coffee with a Googler, giving you a peek at people working on cool stuff that you might find inspirational and useful. Starting with this week’s episode, we’re going to accompany each video with a short post for more details, while also helping you make the most of the tech highlighted in the video.

This week we meet with MacDuff Hughes from the Google Translate team. Google Translate uses statistics based translation. By finding very large numbers of examples of translations from one language to another, it uses statistics to see how various phrases are treated, so it can make reasonable estimates at the correct phrases that are natural sounding in the target language. For common phrases, there are many candidate translations, so the engine converts them within the context of the passage that the phrase is in. Images can also be translated. When you point your mobile device at printed text and it will translate to the preferred for you.

Translate is adding languages all the time, and part of its mission is to serve languages that are less frequently used such as Gaelic, Welsh or Maori, in the same manner as the more commonly used ones, such as English, Spanish and French. To this end, Translate supports more than 90 languages. In the quest to constantly improve translation, the technology provides a way for the community to validate translations, and this is particularly used by less commonly used translations, effectively helping them to grow and thrive. It also enhances the machine translation by having people involved too.

You can learn more about Google Translate, and the translate app here.

Developers have a couple of options to use translate:

• The Free Website Translate plugin that you can add to your site and have translations available immediately.
• The Cloud-based Translate API that you can use to build apps or sites that have translation in them.

Watch the episode here:

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You’re invited to submit an app to the Google Fit Developer Challenge

With the recent launch of the Google Fit platform, we hope to spur innovation in the world of fitness apps and devices that encourage users to have a more active lifestyle. To expand the ecosystem and help users get a more comprehensive view of their fitness, we’re excited to announce the Google Fit Developer Challenge in partnership with adidas, Polar, and Withings.
We’re inviting you to create and showcase an app, or update an existing app, that integrates with Google Fit. The submission deadline is February 17, 2015. Our selected judges will choose up to six new apps and six existing apps for Fit, as the winners. The judges are looking for fitness apps that are innovative, fun to use, keep users coming back, offer users real benefit, and meet the Android design and quality guidelines.

Challenge winners will be featured on Google Play in front of Android users around the world. Runners-ups will also receive prizes, in the form of smart devices from Google, adidas, Polar, and Withings, so that they can continue to tinker and improve their fitness apps with the latest hardware.

Check out the challenge website to find out how to enter*. You will also find some helpful resources to find inspiration. We encourage you to join the Google Fit Developer Community on Google+ to discuss your ideas and the challenge.

* The challenge is open to registered Google Play developers in the US, UK, France, Germany, India, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan who are over the age of 18 (or the age of majority in their country). For the full terms and conditions, read the official rules.

Posted by Angana Ghosh, Product Manager, Google Fit

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The Google Fit Developer Challenge winners

Posted by Angana Ghosh, Product Manager, Google Fit

Last year, we teamed up with adidas, Polar, and Withings to invite developers to create amazing fitness apps that integrated the new Google Fit platform. The community of Google Fit developers has flourished since then and to help get them inspired, we even suggested a few ideas for new, fun, innovative fitness apps. Today, we’re announcing the twelve grand prize winners, whose apps will be promoted on Google Play.

• 7MinGym: All you need is this app, a chair, and a wall to start benefiting from 7 minute workouts at home. You can play music from your favorite music app and cast your workout to Chromecast or Android TV.
• Aqualert: This app reminds you to stay hydrated throughout the day and lets you track your water intake.
• Cinch Weight Loss and Fitness: Cinch helps you with detailed information your steps taken and calories burned. The app also supports heart-rate tracking with compatible Android Wear devices.
• FitHub: FitHub lets you track your fitness activity from multiple accounts, including Google Fit, and multiple wearable devices, including Android Wear. You can also add your friends to compare your progress!
• FitSquad: FitSquad turns fitness into a competition. Join your friends in a squad to compare progress, track achievements, and cheer each other on.
• Instant - Quantified Self: Instant is a lifestyle app that helps you track not only your physical activity but your digital activity too and tells you how much you’re using your phone and apps.other activity. You can also set usage limits and reminders.
• Jump Rope Wear Counter: This simple app lets you count your jump rope skips with an Android Wear device.
• Move it!: This app packs one neat feature – it reminds you to get up and move about if you haven’t been active in the last hour.
• Openrider - GPS Cycling Riding: Track and map your cycle routes with Openrider.
• Running Buddies: In this run tracking app, runners can choose to share their runs and stats with those around them so that they can find other runners similar to themselves to go running with.
• Strength: Strength is a workout tracking app that also lets you choose from a number of routines, so you can get to your workout quickly and track it without manual data entry. Schedules and rest timers come included.
• Walkholic: Walkholic is another way to see your Google Fit walking, cycling, and running data. You can also turn on notifications if you don’t meet your own preset goals.

We saw a wide range of apps that integrated Google Fit, and both the grand prize winners and the runner ups will be receiving some great devices from our challenge partners to help with their ongoing fitness app development: the X_CELL and SPEED_CELL from adidas, a new Android Wear device, a Loop activity tracker with a H7 heart rate sensor from Polar, and a Smart Body Analyzer from Withings.

We’re thrilled these developers chose to integrate the Google Fit platform into their apps, giving users one place to keep all their fitness activities. With the user’s permission, any developer can store or read the user’s data from Google Fit and use it to build powerful and useful fitness experiences. Find out more about integrating Google Fit into your app.

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