One of the most vibrant elements of culture is the use of native languages and the time-honored tradition of storytelling. Anthropologists and linguists have been vocal on the role that language plays in the preservation of culture and how it contributes to the appreciation of heritage. 

Unfortunately, of the more than 7,000 languages that are spoken around the globe, nearly 3,000  are at risk of disappearing. In fact, it’s estimated that on average a language becomes extinct every fourteen days. Google Arts & Culture realized that with some creative technology and partnering with language organisations, we could help create an interactive and educational tool to help promote them.

Enter Woolaroo, an open-source photo-translation platform powered by machine learning and image recognition. The application was built on Google Cloud to encourage users to explore endangered languages around the world. Users are able to take a picture of an object in real-time, and the application returns the word in its native language, along with its pronunciation. 

Woolaroo was created with the philosophy that learning languages is greatly enhanced through engagement and context. By seeing an object in its environment, it’s easier to retain the information and then use it more naturally in conversation. 

With the help of Googlers, Woolaroo was launched in 10 languages, including Calabrian Greek, Louisiana Creole, Maori and Yiddish. During the conception stage of the app, teams from Partner Innovation and Google Arts & Culture put out an open call to the rest of Google to see what lesser-known languages our employees spoke. They then worked with the individuals that responded to develop dictionaries that were reviewed by partner institutions to ensure translations were correct and consistent. 

Woolaroo uses Google Cloud Vision API, which derives insights from images using AutoML or pre-trained models to quickly classify images into millions of predefined categories. This makes AI accessible and useful to more people as AutoML automates the training of these machine learning models.

Our team at Google Arts & Culture creates immersive experiences for people to learn about art, history, culture and more. We are committed to supporting the preservation of heritage and cultural landmarks – including spoken language – through the use of modern technology. The magic of Woolaroo is that it is open source, which means any person or organisation can use it to build something for their own endangered language. To learn about the efforts Google Arts & Culture is involved in, download the Google Arts & Culture app or visit our blog.

Whether they’re reading the newspaper on the way to work, or catching up on the latest headlines on their smartphones, readers expect up-to-the-minute news wherever and whenever makes the most sense for them. As a result, media companies are increasingly looking for ways to improve, expand, and simplify their offerings, and they’re increasingly looking to the cloud to do it.

For more than 160 years The Telegraph has been counted on by readers across the United Kingdom and globally for award-winning news and journalism. An early adopter of cloud technology, it’s been a G Suite customer since 2008 and has already been using Google Cloud Platform to analyze digital behaviors to improve engagement and advertising performance since 2016.

Recently, The Telegraph announced it’s migrating fully to Google Cloud. By migrating all their production and pre-production services, they aim to deliver content faster, provide compelling experiences to readers, and reduce environmental impact.

“We are delighted to announce our newest collaboration with Google Cloud,” said Chris Taylor, Chief Information Officer, The Telegraph. “We have always worked closely with Google as they help us to provide our readers with great experiences on our digital products, collaboration software and internet scale through search. Their continued leadership in projects such as Kubernetes are enabling us to build flexible development environments that truly support DevOps.”

Powering the Digital Publishing Ecosystem

The Telegraph produces large volumes of digital content every day. It was imperative for them to find a cloud provider they could trust to support this ecosystem. By working with Google Cloud they have changed the way they see and engage with data: they can collect new information about their products every second and use that to continually hone their strategy. The Telegraph are placing more confidence and trust in the data captured about their content and now have one of the best available pieces of technology for capturing and analyzing the stories they publish in real-time.

Leveraging AI to support journalists

Time is critical when journalists are on a story, and The Telegraph wants to put important data in the hands of its journalists right when they need it. To do this, it will be using AutoML to classify content for journalists and make it more discoverable. For example, a reporter will be able to bring up relevant assets that link to their stories. It will also apply AutoML to classify Telegraph stock photos to help journalists attach compelling visual content to their stories faster.

Building compelling reader experiences with the help of APIs

Readers have an ever-increasing expectation of personalization. To meet this need, The Telegraph launched My Telegraph, currently live in beta, to offer registered readers personalized news experiences based on their interests or the particular journalists they want to follow. My Telegraph was developed on an API management platform provided by Google Cloud’s Apigee. You can learn more about how it’s applying API management to My Telegraph, in this blog post.

Working for environmental good

The Telegraph is the biggest selling quality newspaper in the UK, an accolade which requires it to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Optimal management of print production is important, and by using a combination of the cloud and machine learning, The Telegraph is better able to predict demand for physical newspapers, maximizing sales and minimizing waste. This makes great business sense for The Telegraph but also has great environmental benefit.

Editor’s note: Today’s post is a Q&A with the VCCP London and VCCP CX team. VCCP London conceived of and built the Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform using Google Maps Platform as a way to get consumers ‘hiding’ eggs and engaging with loved ones during a time when they could not be physically together.

How did the team come up with the idea for the ‘Cadbury Worldwide Hide’?

VCCP London is the agency of record for Cadbury both locally in the UK and centrally with the Global team. So, when Cadbury briefed us in May for their Easter 2021 campaign, they wanted us to come up with a creative way to encourage people to hide eggs and get consumers excited about interacting with loved ones. At the time, the pandemic was constantly changing, and it was looking like we were going to continue to be in lock-down for the foreseeable future, into the Easter season.

We then came up with an idea: wouldn’t it be really cool if somehow you could still hide a real Easter egg for someone you love, but do it virtually. And then once it’s found, that real egg could be delivered to the seeker’s home. With the use of some creativity and technology, we brought this idea to life. The experience we developed allowed our users to purchase a real Cadbury Easter Egg, hide it virtually on the map in a special location, then write the recipient a personalized clue for him to find the egg. Once the seeker found the egg, they would receive a real, physical egg the hider bought for her delivered to her home.

We wanted it to be a truly meaningful one-to-one connection, to bring back some lovely memories for people, and to allow a real chocolate egg to be hidden for a loved one no matter where they were.

Why was this important to Cadbury?

Generosity is at the heart of Cadbury’s brand, and Easter is our opportunity to show that ‘there’s a glass and a half in everyone’. As we enter the second year of our campaign ‘Show you care, hide it’, we are flipping the Easter ritual on its head and showing that the generous act is in hiding an egg for someone you love.

Physical connection has been restricted by the global pandemic and that’s why this year’s Easter campaign sets out to connect people across the UK through the power of generosity.

Tell us a little bit about the technical side of the project. Which Google Maps Platform products did you use to create the user experience?

The Cadbury Worldwide Hide launched across 4 markets (UK, IE, AU, NZ) simultaneously. Integration with regional e-commerce and CRM partners brought the activation into the real world with chocolate eggs being delivered throughout the campaign as seekers found them.

Providing an engaging map experience to our users was key to the execution and by leveraging the Google Maps interface consumers already use on a daily basis, we were able to focus on our core campaign message. We built the platform using both the Maps Javascript API to render the 2D maps and the Street View API, which allowed users to hide their egg anywhere in the world for their loved one to find. We also used Place Autocomplete powered search allowing users to search for their favorite location while contextual hints kept hiders on track. Seekers were aided with a distance meter and hints system if they got stuck. Our Design and Engineering team used Google Maps Platform Cloud-based maps styling to customize the map.

To get the campaign to as many people as possible we prioritized accessibility throughout the site, from screen-reader support and relevant tab indexes through to full keyboard shortcuts within the map experience – allowing users to hide (or find!) their egg without ever using a mouse. Real user testing was done throughout the UX, design and development process to ensure best practices were being followed.

How long did it take the VCCP team to build-out the solution?

Discovery to the roll-out of the solution took about 7 months. Our Design and Engineering team started with a 4-week discovery phase in September 2020 where we developed a service blueprint that set the foundations of the project. By visualizing the entire process of a service from start to finish, listing all the activities that happened at each stage, and the different roles, actions, processes and systems involved, the blueprint allowed all stakeholders to align on the solution.

We started iterative cycles of development in November 2020, beginning with UX (prototype for user testing), UI (look and feel and customization of Google Maps using Cloud-based Maps styling), and then kicked off front end and back end development in December. We launched the Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform in early March 2021—just in time for millions of users around the world to enjoy ahead of Easter.

Did you experience any challenges as you developed the experience?

The biggest challenge was actually around adapting to change in plans in response to the desire to launch the platform across more markets than originally intended. During the development phase, we rapidly scaled up to develop the platform for Ireland, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the UK within the same timeframe.

What results were you able to achieve and how did you measure the success of the project?

One week before Easter Sunday, we had sold out of Cadbury Worldwide Hide chocolate eggs. There were over 2.26 million site visits with an average time spent on the platform of almost five minutes. Over 809k virtual eggs were hidden in total and 14.5k real Cadbury Easter eggs bought. The Cadbury Worldwide Hide platform was the number one Mondelēz International website globally, and a couple even used the platform for a marriage proposal!

Would you recommend this type of campaign and user engagement to other B-to-C brands, if so, why?

Direct to consumer capabilities are increasingly important for brands, particularly in the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) space. Local lockdowns and restrictions on physical retail have accelerated our adoption of ecommerce. Not only have brands had to adapt quickly, but consumers are beginning to expect direct-to-consumer capabilities from their favorite brands. Cadbury recognized this behavior shift early. What the Cadbury Worldwide Hide did well was to innovate beyond the traditional DTC and ecommerce experience by gamifying the platform and enabling moments of human connection at a time when physical connection was impossible. 

What advice would you give to other agencies or brands thinking about creating user experiences with Google Maps Platform?

We learned a great deal taking on this project. Here are just a few highlights:

• Assume anything is possible.
• Our ‘Mobile First’ approach allowed consumers to access the platform from any device with consistent, engaging brand experience.
• Think big and beyond the traditional use of Google Maps and treat it as a foundation platform to build upon.
• Prototype and test early to validate your hypotheses. We created a technical proof of concept which enabled us to test using ‘real’ Google Maps and real people early in our design process.
• Don’t assume everything is accessible to everyone. You may need to build upon the ‘out the box’ functionality to ensure as many people as possible can use your solution.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

We’re excited to announce that Spring Cloud GCP version 4.0 is now generally available! In this post, we’ll be describing what the new major version has to offer, and demonstrating the process of using the migration guide on one of our reference architectures, Bank of Anthos.

What’s new?

With this release, Spring Cloud GCP officially supports Spring Boot 3.x. However, this migration involves a number of breaking changes as outlined in the migration guide. The full list of changes made is available on Github, but the one of the most significant differences is that Java 17 is now a minimum requirement.

Another notable feature of this release is the addition of starter artifacts – Spring Boot starters for Google Cloud – that provide dependencies and auto-configurations for 80+ Google Client libraries. Just as the name suggests, these starters can serve as helpful starting points when working with a new client library. For now, they’re in preview. 

These starters are not included in the BOM by default and need to be added as a dependency to your project before they can be used. For example, if you wanted to get started with Cloud Text-to-Speech, you would include the following:

<dependency>

    <groupId>com.google.cloud</groupId>

    <artifactId>google-cloud-texttospeech-spring-starter</artifactId>

    <version>4.0.0-preview</version>

  </dependency>

The upgrade process

We prepared a migration guide to help answer any questions involved with moving from 3.x to 4.x.  Let’s follow those instructions to migrate Bank of Anthos.

We’ll start by cloning and building the application before the upgrade, according to the quickstart and development guide:

PROJECT_ID=<YOUR-PROJECT-ID>
gcloud services enable container --project ${PROJECT_ID}

git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/bank-of-anthos.git
cd bank-of-anthos/

gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com monitoring.googleapis.com \
  --project ${PROJECT_ID}

REGION=us-central1
gcloud container clusters create-auto bank-of-anthos \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}

gcloud container clusters get-credentials bank-of-anthos \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}

skaffold run --default-repo=gcr.io/${PROJECT_ID}/bank-of-anthos

With the environment set up for development, we’re ready to move on to the actual migration. The migration is already complete at time of writing, but here’s the full list of changes made:

• We began by checking the current Java, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud GCP versions.
  • Our Java version is okay, but the other two are out of date, and will need to be updated.
    We can also add the Spring Cloud GCP BOM to manage our versions going forward while we’re here.
• Then, in no particular order, we can make the following code changes:
  • Remove the explicit type declarations from our ResponseEntity instantiations.
  • Replace all javax.* imports with Jakarta.* counterparts, since Spring 3.0 makes use of Jakarta EE 9.0

With those changes in place, the app is upgraded and ready to re-deploy!

Live example

For a finished example of this migration, check out the Bank of Anthos repository on Github. It’s an excellent sample application that showcases a polyglot Java & Python app, served on Kubernetes and Google Cloud. All CI/CD and configurations are open source, so it may be instructive as you approach this migration.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to provide comments or feedback on Twitter, or in the issues section of the repository.