What does “accessibility” mean to businesses? It’s not just about making sure that your office or retail space is accessible to workers and customers who have mobility challenges, it’s also about making sure that your apps, digital tools and content are also more accessible to everyone. 

Our product teams work every day to ensure that tools like G Suite have built-in accessibility features. As a Program Manager, I help create those features and use many of them myself, as I’m blind. I would like to give an overview of product accessibility features that have been available for some time, as well as some new ones. 

Listen to content with help from screen readers. 
A screen reader is a helpful tool for people who are blind or have low vision. It provides methods to interact and control applications and also converts content on screen into spoken text. With a screen reader and keyboard shortcuts, you can read, edit, and comment on files. Getting started is easy: In Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets, go to the Tools menu, and in “Accessibility settings,” check the “Turn on screen reader support” box. Learn how to turn on screen reader support in Docs.

G Suite supports several screen readers, including ChromeVox, Google’s own screen reader. ChromeVox is automatically built into Chrome devices, like Chromebooks. You just have to enable it. There are many other screen readers you can use with G Suite too; this support guide explains which screen readers work best with which web browsers.

Another way to listen to content is with Select-to-speak, a feature that reads content aloud to you using text-to speech (TTS) to verbalize highlighted content. To try it out, highlight text and activate the select-to-speak button. An example of a select-to-speak tool is the one built into ChromeOS.

See a summary of changes to your documents.
To make it easier for people to keep track of collaborators’ contributions in Google Docs (without having to actively watch every single change), we recently added a feature called Live Edits. Helpful if you use a screen reader or magnification, Live Edits periodically summarizes changes made to a document by collaborators within the sidebar. Learn how to comment and collaborate in Docs using a screen reader.

And for people who are sensitive to visual crowding, we also introduced eight different Lexend font families that have varied widths and spacing to accommodate different reading speeds. Read more details about these font options.

Use voice typing to “write” by speaking. 
Voice typing is a powerful productivity tool for everyone, including those who do not use a keyboard. It’s especially useful for people with low vision or with motor disabilities that may prevent them from using keyboards, mice or trackpads. When you speak into the computer’s microphone, voice typing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert your voice into text. In Docs, you can even use voice commands to select and edit text—for example, bolding words or cutting and pasting text.

Scale-out workloads demand the best combination of performance and price to bring down the cost of delivering applications, all while providing an excellent user experience. We are excited to announce a new virtual machine (VM) family, Tau VMs, coming to Google Cloud. Tau VMs extend Compute Engine’s VM offerings with a new option optimized for cost-effective performance of scale-out workloads. 

T2D, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC^TM processors and leapfrogs the VMs for scale-out workloads of any leading public cloud provider available today, both in terms of performance and workload total cost of ownership (TCO). The x86 compatibility provided by these AMD EPYC processor-based VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture. 

As illustrated below, Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance (est. SPECrate2017_int_base) compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors.

What our customers and partners are saying

Snap
“At Snap, it is critical for our business to continue improving our scale-out compute infrastructure for key Snapchat capabilities like AR, Lenses, Spotlight and Maps,” said Cody Powell, Senior Engineering Manager, Snap Inc. “We were impressed when we tested Google Cloud’s new Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine. While it’s early days, we believe we can gain double digits in infrastructure performance improvements for key workloads—enabling us to do more with less and invest even more in new features for our amazing Snapchat community.”

Twitter
“High performance at the right price point is a critical consideration as we work to serve the global public conversation,” said Nick Tornow, Platform Lead, Twitter. “We are excited by initial tests that show potential for double digit performance improvement. We are collaborating with Google Cloud to more deeply evaluate benefits on price and performance for specific compute workloads that we can realize through use of the new Tau VM family.”

DoiT
“DoiT partners with leading cloud vendors who are focused on growth and cost optimization,” said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO, DoiT International. “In our preliminary testing of Google’s new Tau VMs with the Coremark benchmark, we were thrilled to see the incredible performance at 50% better than a comparable ARM-based offering from another leading public cloud. With Tau VMs, Google Cloud has set a new bar for price-performance, making the cloud even more accessible to digital-native companies. We are excited to bring Google’s Tau VMs to our joint customers.”

Designed for demanding scale-out workloads 

Tau VMs bring the benefit of Google’s long-standing experience engineering platforms for scale-out workloads to our customers. They come in multiple predefined VM shapes, with up to 60vCPUs per VM, and 4GB of memory per vCPU. They offer up to 32 Gbps networking bandwidth and a wide range of network attached storage options, making Tau VMs ideal for scale-out workloads including web servers, containerized microservices, data-logging processing, media transcoding, and large-scale Java applications. 

Google Kubernetes Engine support

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the de facto standard for organizations looking for advanced container orchestration, delivering the highest levels of reliability, security, and scalability. GKE supports Tau VMs on day 1, helping you optimize price-performance for your containerized workloads. You can add Tau VMs to your GKE clusters by specifying the T2D machine type in your GKE node-pools. 

Pricing

Tau VMs will be priced to support significant TCO and price-performance improvements for your cloud applications. A 32vCPU VM with 128GB RAM will be priced at $1.3520 per hour for on-demand usage in us-central1. 

Coming soon to a Google Cloud region near you

If you are interested in trying out T2D VMs when they become available in Q3 2021 please sign-up here.

Getting started with Kubernetes is often harder than it needs to be. While working with a cluster “from scratch” can be a great learning exercise or a good solution for some highly specialized workloads, often the details of cluster management can be made easier by utilizing a managed service offering. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) allows for an easier end-to-end developer experience with convenient tooling and built-in integrations along with the convenience of offering Kubernetes clusters as a managed service.

GKE is the most mature container orchestration service available today, delivering a fully-managed service and hands-off experience with the GKE Autopilot mode of operation. GKE provides industry-first capabilities such as release channels, multi-cluster support, unique four-way auto scaling, node auto repair, and can support up to 15K nodes in a single cluster. 

Our modern, end-to-end platform is built on cloud-native principles you are already familiar with and prioritizes speed, security, and flexibility, in ways that are highly differentiated from other cloud platforms. 

We have put together a new reference guide for you as you begin your journey developing on GKE. It covers every step of your journey from writing, running, operating, to managing code. Even if it isn’t your first time using GKE, this e-book will be a valuable resource highlighting important considerations and best practices. By implementing the technical recommendations, following the steps, and utilizing the tools described, you can reach the following goals:

• Write, deploy, and debug code faster with Cloud Code and Cloud Shell
• Continuously integrate and deliver updates with Cloud Build
• Run easily, securly, cost effectively at scale with GKE
• Monitor and troubleshoot with Google Cloud’s operations suite 

Kick-start your journey by downloading the e-book and join us live June 22 at 9am PDT for our half-day Cloud OnBoard event: Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine. 

When I reflect back on the past year and the pandemic, I’m struck by how the reliance on remote work and operations has changed the fundamentals of business forever. For the financial services industry, this rings particularly true. Many conversations I’m having right now with organizations revolve around embracing a transformation cloud, and thinking of cloud computing not just as an infrastructure decision, but also as the locus for transformation throughout the company. 

Today, as we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’ll demonstrate just how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. We hope you’ll join us.

How we’re helping financial services firms build their transformation clouds

At Google Cloud, we continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments customers around the world. Our work with financial services industry customers has given us a deep understanding of the real-world, specific use cases that matter most to them. This groundwork led us to engineer products and solutions that are open and flexible, not ones that force them to rip out existing investments in ERP or other early IaaS cloud implementations. 

It’s why we’ve engineered solutions such as Lending DocAI, Open Banking with Apigee, and Datashare for financial services to help transform the industry. These solutions were created with our customers’ security and compliance top-of-mind and are built at the intersection of user-optimized experience, technology, and sovereignty.

At their core, financial institutions want to drive growth, reduce costs, mitigate risk, stay compliant, and increase efficiency. As a result, when we partner with them on their transformation journeys, we consider three essential focus areas: 

• Enabling the human experience and connected interactions
• Building an open and intelligent data foundation for better insights
• Providing the most trusted and secure cloud in the industry

Enabling humans and connected interactions

A company’s transformation is about more than technology; people and culture ultimately drive change. HSBC, for example, recognized its business users would benefit from guided answers to common questions around risk policy compliance, and turned to Google Cloud to leverage AI and machine learning bots to assist employees, ease the burden on policy experts, and improve the user experience. Using Dialogflow, a core component of Contact Center AI, HSBC was able to build a conversational platform that quickly and accurately addresses user needs at scale. 

Another example is Equifax, which used Google Workspace to support collaboration not only internally between employees, but also externally with customers. Customers can use Google Cloud solutions for financial services to build these sorts of technology-enabled human interactions quickly and easily—supporting organizational change at scale.

Building an open and intelligent data foundation for smarter, faster insights

The real impact of Google Cloud solutions for financial services comes when the whole company has access to the right information at the right time, and can act more intelligently on that data. Our solutions help businesses safely leverage their data and get a complete 360-degree view of their customers’ information, which can often be scattered across multiple systems (CRM, lending, credit, etc.). This helps financial institutions improve the overall customer experience—and sometimes even develop new products quickly. 

Indeed, all financial institutions are looking for ways to grow revenue and reduce expenses, and data can be a critical ingredient to doing both effectively. As daily transactions rise, so does the volume and complexity of data. But to implement new customer experience innovations (and new revenue streams), financial institutions must first capture data effectively. This is why AXA Switzerland, for example, uses real-time analytics on Google Cloud to gain cross-industry insights about future trends and customer preferences.

Financial services organizations also need the confidence of building on a platform that provides choice, flexibility, and agility to move fast. It’s why we have an open cloud approach that allows Google Cloud services to run in different physical locations such as on-premises, other public clouds, and the edge. Customers can also harness the power of data and AI through our open APIs, machine-learning services, and analytics engines on any major cloud platform. This is why companies like Macquarie Bank are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to modernize and empower its developers.

Compliant and secure to address risk and regulatory needs

As a highly regulated industry, financial services is focused on security and compliance, risk and regulations, and fraud detection and prevention. Google Cloud offers unique capabilities to earn customers’ trust as part of our continuing work to be the most trusted cloud in the industry. Google Cloud provides a secure foundation that you can verify and independently control. Our cloud technology reduces risk and data loss, because it is built on comprehensive zero-trust architecture. Finally, we offer a shared-fate model built on best practices in risk management via automation, guidance, and insurance. This is why customers like BBVA have confidence anywhere their systems may operate. 

On the regulatory front, global legislators and regulators continue to focus on the stability of the industry that only a decade ago went through one of the biggest liquidity crises in history. With this oversight comes strong expectations of risk mitigation. Google Cloud offers a single, global set of controls, reviewed by financial institutions and regulators around the world, and verified in collaborative audits—making compliance simpler and less costly for our customers.

Finally, Google Cloud allows financial services firms to operate confidently with advanced security tools that help protect data, applications, and infrastructure, as well as their customers from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse. We help protect your data against threats, using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, ensuring you never have to trade-off between ease of use and security. Google Cloud encrypts data at-rest and in-transit. And we now also offer the ability to encrypt data-in use, while it’s being processed for customer VM and container workloads.

Let us help you with your transformation cloud journey

We’ve seen leading financial services companies embrace Google Cloud to help them move beyond infrastructure toward the next phase of their cloud evolution. This is an era where no company is better positioned to lead than Google Cloud, and we’re excited to help you with your journey.

Learn more about Google Cloud for financial services.