Google has expanded its “Auto Awesome” tools, letting users create ‘show reels’ of their videos and photos, as the web giant claims its social network has passed the 300 million active user mark. Earlier this year Google began offering the ability to automatically enhance photos by making adjustments to improve bad shots or make good […]
Google has expanded its “Auto Awesome” tools, letting users create ‘show reels’ of their videos and photos, as the web giant claims its social network has passed the 300 million active user mark.
Earlier this year Google began offering the ability to automatically enhance photos by making adjustments to improve bad shots or make good shots even better, while sometimes even creating animated GIFs out of a series of shots.
Now Google is also offering ‘Auto Awesome Movie’ which can automatically edit together photo and video clips, select the best action and cut the rest, and add a soundtrack — without any user intervention at all.
Auto Awesome Movie will be available in Google+ for certain devices running Android 4.3 and later.
The feature automatically analyzes home videos that users take on their smartphones and have uploaded to Google+, automatically producing short movies. The technology combines the best clips of similar videos, adds music, and mixes in related photographs.
Other new features include incorporating SMS text messages into Google’s messaging service and new location-sharing capabilities.
The new features mark Google’s latest move to try and differentiate its 2-year-old social network from Facebook, the world’s No 1 online social network with 1.15 billion users.
Google said on Tuesday that 300 million users visit the web page of its social network every month, up from 190 million “in stream” users in May. The company noted that its users upload 1.5 billion photos to Google+ every week.
“We want to be more than just a lightweight sharing service. We want to be the archive of your life,” Google+ Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz said on the sidelines of an event in San Francisco to announce the new features.
