How a Former Refugee is Using Tech to Transform the Lives of Women in Afghanistan
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Born in Iran as a refugee during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I understand the challenges many people face there to get access to formal education. I was one of eight children in a progressive, yet financially limited, family. We left everything behind in Herat to move to a new country. To make ends meet, my mother sold handmade clothing. She invested what little she earned in my education, which made it possible for me to finish high school.
While opportunities for education in Afghanistan have increased over the past few decades, there are still many barriers that stand in the way of education for Afghan women—familial expectations, socioeconomic circumstances, cultural stigmas, societal norms and even safety issues. These circumstances make it challenging for women to find work and explain why only 19 percent participate in the workforce, 84 percent lack formal education and are often illiterate, and just 2 percent have access to higher education.
2001 marked the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and many Afghan families, including my own, found hope in their motherland again. The next year, I returned to Herat. Seeing my peers —women just like me with so much potential—I felt compelled to do something. But I knew that in order to help others, I first needed to further my own education. I earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and later a Master’s degree from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany.
When I returned to Afghanistan after school, I hoped to share my newly-minted tech skills with Herat women by teaching at the local university. At the time, few women were participating in the public workforce and there were still many extremist, conservative views in the country. I was vocal about inequalities and faced backlash from the community; because of these threats, I came to the United States as an asylum seeker in 2012.
After arriving in the United States, I was inspired to start Code to Inspire, the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan between the ages of 15 and 25 that provides free after school education in gaming, web development, graphic design, mobile applications and full stack development. Our goal is to empower women with the skills they need to program so that they can drive change in their communities and gain equal access to opportunities and financial independence.
Determined to make this coding school happen, I found myself faced with an interesting obstacle: how could I build an education center in Afghanistan without ever leaving the US?
To make this possible, I turned to technology—just as I had hoped my future students would. I took a side job teaching Farsi to pay my bills, and built the blueprint for Code to Inspire from a laptop in Brooklyn. I managed everything from my computer working from cafes in New York: fundraising, shipping equipment, recruiting mentors, registering applicants, and developing the curriculum.
To move things forward day-to-day, I use G Suite to communicate and collaborate with my team. I use Hangouts Meet to connect with students remotely during weekly calls and monthly check-ins. We use Google Docs, Sheets and Slides to create essential documents and keep track of our operations. We even used Slides for our first pitch deck, which I shared with my board to get their feedback. This power and connectivity enabled a refugee to make her dream come true, and built up the digital literacy of the women I was working with back home!
Since opening its doors, 150 girls have studied with us, and the students have created so many interesting projects. One inspiring example is the popular mobile game, Afghan Hero Girl, which has taken off in Afghanistan and abroad, and was even recognized by the local government. The girls developed the game to show a female protagonist dressed in traditional Afghan garb, who undergoes obstacles that are relatable to them.
Over 50 women have graduated from Code to Inspire, and 20 have secured remote full-time employment and freelance projects. Many of these women are even out-earning their male relatives who have become huge supporters of the program.
By 2030, we hope to open two additional schools in Kabul and Mazar that can serve up to 500 girls and provide employment opportunities within six months of graduation. From the ruins of a shattered nation and shattered lives of refugees can come treasure, if we know where to find it. For me, the girls in Afghanistan are the treasure and investing in their education is the future of a peaceful Afghanistan.
Google Cloud’s Virtual Appointment Scheduling Tool (VAST) Helps State of Arizona Recover from Unemployment Situation
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When the world was forced to go primarily online, state governments also faced the reality of needing to provide community services without the health risk of meeting in person. Old systems that relied on interpersonal contact could not keep up. An unprecedented number of displaced workers swamped every unemployment system. The capacity challenges weren’t limited to state labor departments either. Everything from birth certificates and marriage licenses to apostilles and court system services that could usually be handled by a simple walk-in had to be scheduled in advance. Both internal and external communication suffered.
To meet these challenges, many organizations turned to new technology solutions and innovative approaches.
How VAST helped Arizona get back to work
The State of Arizona had tens of thousands of constituents who relied on pandemic unemployment insurance and would also need tools to reenter the workforce.Tim Tucker, Deputy Administrator of the Workforce Development Administration for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, started preparing in late 2020. He collaborated with Google Cloud and SADA to introduce the Virtual Appointment Scheduling Tool (VAST) to State of Arizona staff members. Using VAST reduced the excessive workload taken on by the Workforce Development Administration as they got Arizona back to work. VAST lets constituents book an appointment, upload documents and forms, and conduct career counseling virtually. This helped constituents move through the system faster so they could successfully reenter the workforce.
That preparation paid off. As of September 2021, Arizona had recovered the majority of the jobs lost during the pandemic. It has also seen one of the smallest percent change in employment compared with pre-pandemic numbers. Even more impressive, Arizona is one of only five states where unemployment claims are now lower than pre-pandemic numbers. Using VAST helped them get people back to work faster and has become a permanent part of their unemployment program.
Bringing streamlined services to the community
To fully realize a solution to the challenges faced by our public sector customers, we focused on three key areas in which we knew we needed VAST to excel:
- Efficient staff allocation
- Streamlined internal meetings
- Confident constituent interactions
We also knew our customers needed to get VAST online fast, and it needed to work with existing infrastructure without requiring a total overhaul. These areas informed the design of VAST’s features and have allowed us to meet the challenges faced by agencies such as the Arizona Department of Economic Security.
Virtual Agent support and integrations
VAST gives constituents 24×7 virtual agent support powered by Google Cloud’s contact center AI virtual agents. Virtual agents are custom programmed to fit the specific needs of each agency and community they serve. It’s easy to add new options and information whenever an update is needed. Virtual agents can be designed to understand the user’s intent and serve up relevant content for a smooth user experience on both ends of the system. Virtual agents run at scale and offer multi-language support, ensuring they can serve everyone in the community. By pairing these with VAST, constituents can experience seamless self-service.
6 week deployment time
Most of our public sector clients needed a solution yesterday. VAST can be deployed rapidly, taking about six weeks from start to finish, which includes everything–even staff training time.
Integration with Google Workspace and Chrome
VAST securely integrates with other Google solutions, such as Google Workspace and Chromebooks. We work to ensure VAST is fully functional within your existing systems.
Collaboration and support
SADA collaborates with each organization to ensure that the design, development, and functionality of VAST align with their needs. SADA specializes in helping public sector customers migrate to Google Cloud.
Analytics
Application administrators have access to analytic data gathered by VAST and options to customize and add additional datasets.This data helps organizations find blind spots in coverage, fix service bottlenecks, and better organize internal resources. Leveraging this data gives organizations the power to make changes, resulting in everything from a smoother customer experience to cost savings.
To learn more about how Google Cloud has supported Arizona during the pandemic, check out this blog on how their vaccination distribution system leveraged Google Cloud to get the vaccine to more people. For more information on how VAST can streamline a customer experience.
Cart.com to Transform e-Commerce for Brands Globally
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The ecommerce playing field has been hard to navigate for most retailers, and Cart.com is on a mission to change that. Traditionally, retailers needing to run their online store, order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, and other essential activities have had to cobble together systems to get the capabilities they need – much less having access to analytics across these functions. The result is costly, siloed ecommerce operations that are difficult to manage and scale.
It’s clearly not a formula for success, yet that’s the reality facing most retailers. Cart.com, in contrast, has set out to democratize ecommerce by giving brands of all sizes the full capabilities they need to take on the world’s largest online retailers. Our end-to-end environment empowers retailers to keep more of their revenue, set up proven strategies for managing all aspects of their business, and act on valuable insights from customer data every step of the way.
Together with our talented team, we’re building a unified ecommerce platform that already provides value to many leading or up and coming brands including Whataburger, GUESS, Dr. Scholl’s, Rowing Blazers, and Howler Bros.
We’re excited about the opportunity ahead as we reimagine traditional approaches to online sales, fulfillment, marketing, accessing growth capital, providing a unified view of all ecommerce and marketing analytics, and other activities. Expectations for Cart.com are high, and we are building a company that can scale to $100B in revenue and beyond. Supported by the Startup Program by Google Cloud and Google Cloud solutions, we’re establishing a technology platform to transform all aspects of ecommerce for brands worldwide.
Partner in disruption
At Cart.com, we’re currently targeting an underserved market. Our ideal customer is beyond demonstrating product-market-fit and is now at an inflection point seeking a growth opportunity. Typically, those companies are generating between $1M and $100M in annual revenue. We’ve seen an enthusiastic response from brands and retailers as well as investors, with backing from investors in just over a year totaling $143 million in three funding rounds.
Our strategy is to build an integrated ecommerce model that combines best-of-breed solutions, many of which we gain through acquisitions and then build upon to provide a streamlined and fully integrated experience for our brands. We’ve made seven acquisitions so far to round out our online store, order fulfillment, marketing services, customer service, and we have launched some integral partnerships including easy access to growth capital through our relationship with Clearco and product protection for customers on every purchase with Extend. Instead of acquiring a data company, we’re building our data platform on Google Cloud, across each operating function for a single-view for brands to harness actionable data. We see Google Cloud as the leader for data management, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Other reasons why we’re building our business on Google Cloud include scalability, excellence, security, reach, and data analytics that are far superior to other environments.
We also feel a cultural and mission alignment with Google Cloud and envision leaning into a long-term partnership of marketing, selling, and disrupting the disruptors together. Equally important to us are the investments Google Cloud is willing to make in early-stage companies like ours. The support through the Google Cloud for Startups program has been outstanding.
Built on Google Cloud
A wide range of Google Cloud solutions provide the foundation for our platform. For instance, Cloud Pub/Sub keeps our services communicating with one another. We rely on fully managed relational databases, like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner, to securely handle the huge volume of brand and shopper data generated every day.
Cloud Run allowed us to develop inside of containers before our Kubernetes infrastructure was ready to go. Now, we are taking advantage of all the capabilities in Google Kubernetes Engine. BigQuery integrates with all Google Cloud solutions and offers true data streaming natively out of the box, along with Dataflow for advanced analytics. We also use Container Registry to store and manage our Docker container images. Right now, we’re testing Cloud Composer to evaluate using it for data workflow orchestration instead of Apache Airflow.
The openness of the Google Cloud environment is further enabled by Anthos, which we may deploy soon to perform data integrations quickly as we acquire more companies over the next year. For example, if we acquire a company using Azure, we can easily align it with our Google Cloud ecosystem.
Enabling ecommerce 2.0
Recently, our team has been experimenting with Google Cloud Vertex AI and the fully managed services of AI deployment and ML operations. The capabilities would save us substantial time in the management of the ML lifecycle which allows us to focus more on developing proprietary AI that will transform commerce at scale.
Because Google Cloud is so far ahead in data science, our teams benefit from deep Google Cloud expertise as we look to provide brands with unmatched insights into customers to improve services and revenue. We’re also planning to test Recommendations AI among other tools to deploy customer product recommendations and personalization as turnkey productized offerings. Moving forward, we will likely use Bigtable to aid in serving machine learning to hundreds of thousands of brands due to its low latency and scalability.
Fanatical about brand success
We know that our work with Google Cloud for Startups and use of Google Cloud solutions for best-in-class data management, analytics, ML, and AI will enable us to offer even more transformative services to brands.
We also see the opportunity to use our platform and customer insights to break down barriers between brands, enabling retailers to share information and work better together when it’s in their best interests. What we’re building today on Google Cloud is fundamentally changing what’s possible for retailers of any size everywhere.
As a startup, when recruiting talent or working with prospective customers, it helps to share our success with Google Cloud. We view them as an extension of the Cart.com team. It also validates our business as we continue building a more integrated, holistic approach to commerce that opens new opportunities and drives growth for brands worldwide.
For more details about Cart.com’s vision for unified ecommerce, check out our video.
If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.
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Power your business with search and AI in G Suite
More than ever, businesses are dealing with major challenges like increased competition, data and information overload, and processes slowing people down.
To overcome these challenges, businesses need to move faster, harness data and resources and remove friction from getting things done.
We know that countless hours are wasted every day by information workers doing mundane tasks that distract and take time away from the creative knowledge work where they can uniquely add value. In 2019, we commissioned a total economic impact analysis with Forrester Research, and based on a number of interviews with our customers, we have learned that G Suite* is delivering value in four key ways, revenue growth, employee efficiency, risk mitigation, and IT cost savings.
The numbers are all based on a composite customer with 20,000 users generating $3 billion a year in revenue. For highly collaborative employees, the time savings of mundane tasks with G Suite is huge. Almost an extra month’s worth of time every year, with 20% of that time reallocated towards value-added tasks that are important to your business.
In this video, find out how G Suite can help with employee efficiency, saving people time, boosting productivity, and reducing frustration.
(G Suite* is now Google Workspace)
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Work beyond borders: How to use G Suite with Microsoft and your favorite third-party applications
The average enterprise uses 129 different applications on a day to day basis. These applications enable critical workflows that drive businesses forward. But when these apps don’t work well together that leads to lost time, frustration, and missed opportunities.
Professionals have access to dozens of applications in their organization. Apps like DocuSign, Box, or Trello can simplify individual processes and drive businesses to adopt newer ways of work. It’s really great that there seems to be an app specifically designed for what we need to get done for each task.
But there’s a downside to this proliferation of apps. The flood of notifications and disconnected processes frustrates users. Our work is spread across more apps than ever before, which inevitably leads to lots of apps switching, and reduces our ability to focus. Context-switching between applications cuts into time spent on value-additive work.
Learn how G Suite works seamlessly with Microsoft and other third-party applications to support key workflows, enhance collaboration, and help teams get to impact quickly.
*Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite.
Latest Features and Updates to Globally Bolster Translation Services
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Let’s face it: in the globalized world, which is now more than ever a digital demand world, you need to scale and reach your customers right where they’re at. Translation is a critical piece of that, whether you’re translating a website in multiple languages or releasing a document, a piece of software, or training materials.
Manual translation does not scale, which is why machine translation, powered by machine learning (ML), is becoming more important to our customers. Machine translation has historically been challenging because of the sheer volume and breadth of content that can add value when translated into multiple languages. Companies acquire and share content in many languages and formats, and scaling translation to meet needs is a tall order due to multiple document formats, integrations with optical character recognition (OCR), and the need to correct for domain-specific terminology.
Our goal is to simplify translation services, while enabling flexibility and control for our customers’ unique needs across industries. Read on to learn more about recent features and updates.
Formatting matters: Document Translation is now GA
In many cases, the layout of a document dictates how it should be interpreted—e.g., readers navigate text and discern meaning based on formatting, like bold or italicized text, or markups for headers, paragraphs, and columns. Previously, to automate translation of documents, text needed to be separated from these layout attributes, meaning the document’s structure was either lost or needed to be recreated later in the developer pipeline, after the text had been translated. This required translation teams to do a lot of extra work and maintain a lot of additional code. But now, those steps are unnecessary. Formatting can be retained throughout the translation process, handled directly by the Translation API Advanced.
This feature lets customers translate documents in 100+ languages and supports document types such as Docx, PPTx, XLSx, and PDF while preserving document formatting.
And if your needs go beyond Document Translation, we can help you translate audio as well. For real-time streaming translation, check out the Media Translation API, and for offline transcription translation, combine the Translation API with the Video Intelligence API.
Real-Time translation when you need it, Batch when you don’t
One of the biggest differentiators for Translation API Advanced’s document translation capabilities is the ability to do real-time, synchronous processing for a single file.
For example, if you are translating a business document such as HR documentation, online translation provides flexibility for smaller files and provides faster results. You can easily integrate with our APIs via REST or gRPC with mobile or browser applications, with instant access to 100+ language pairs so that content can be understandable in any supported language.
Meanwhile, batch translation allows customers to translate multiple files into multiple languages in a single request. For each request, customers can send up to 100 files with a total content size of up to 1 GB or 100 million Unicode codepoints, whichever limit is hit first.
State of the Art (SOTA) accuracy, with flexibility for customization
In order to achieve the highest level of accuracy for your translation, we now support multiple options:
- Use Google’s SOTA translation models: Each year, Google heavily invests to improve the quality of our translations across Apps, Cloud APIs, and Chrome, as well to enable multilanguage answers in Search. A popular metric for automatic quality evaluation of Machine translation systems is the BLEU score, which is based on the similarity between machine translation and the reference translations that were generated by people. While we push out incremental improvements for individual models on a monthly cadence, there are also times where we make significant leaps. In the releases since 2019, we have improved our average BLEU score by 5pts on average across 100+ languages and 7pts on low resource languages.
- Leverage glossaries for specific terms and phrases: Glossary is our terminology control feature. It allows you to import source content to define preferred translations, such as product names or department names. Then, when calling the glossary in the API request, your preferred translations will be enforced. This will work for words as well as phrase translation.
- Pick a pre-trained model with model selection: If you create custom models for machine translation, we don’t think you should have multiple client libraries and multiple APIs to maintain in order for you to use the best model for your needs. Translation API Advanced now supports Model Selection. Pick your pretrained model or pick your custom ML model built on AutoML for any language pair you’ve created and use the same API and the same client library.
- Build custom translation models with AutoML: AutoML Translation is a suite of ML products that enable you to build high quality models for your own use case or data, with limited-to-no ML expertise or coding required. Bring your past human-validated translations to improve translation specificity for your domain.
Keep localization local with Regional Endpoints
If you are a customer operating in the EU, we recently launched an endpoint specifically for EU regionalization. This is a configurable endpoint for customers to store and perform machine translation processing of customer data only in the EU multi region. For now, this only supports our pretrained translation models and glossary, but batch translations will be coming soon.
How Eli Lilly uses Cloud Translation to translate content globally
Historically, translations at Eli Lilly have been complicated: numerous translation vendors have been needed for different languages and organizations, all with their own processes and expectations. On top of that, translations have been costly and slow.
To solve this, Eli Lilly took a codified approach to enable users and systems to spend less time and resources to safely generate quality translations.
Learn more, and even catch a demo, from Thomas Griffin, Translation Tech Lead & Global Regulatory Architect for Eli Lilly.
Learn more
- To get started using Cloud Translation – Advanced, complete the setup and then try the Translate text (Advanced edition) quickstart.
- Document Translation is priced per page. For more information, see pricing.
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