What you need to know
- Google announced new updates and expansions to its existing online safety features.
- Guest Mode on Google Assistant will be available in nine additional languages in the coming months.
- The Google Fi app will soon allow you to share your location with friends and family members for free.
- Beginning next month, you'll be able to turn on Google's account-level enhanced safe browsing.
Last year, Google unveiled an incognito-style feature for Google Assistant called Guest Mode, which prevents your interactions on Nest speakers and displays from being saved. The feature was initially available on a few languages, but that's changing soon.
Google announced this week that Guest Mode is coming to nine more languages over the coming months. It's adding support for Danish, Indonesian, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Thai, Mandarin (Taiwan), and Hindi (via 9to5Google).
Currently, the feature's language support is limited to English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, and Korean. When turned on, Guest Mode won't remember your Assistant activities on the best smart displays such as the Nest Hub (2nd Gen). It will also exclude personal information from searches, which comes in handy if other people are trying to access your smart home device.
In addition to language expansion, Google announced a few other updates focused on online safety. Starting next month, the search giant will allow you to switch on its account-level enhanced safe browsing feature, which helps combat web-based threats against your account. This new toggle will soon start showing up in your account settings or when you perform a security checkup.
You'll also be able to share your location with family directly from the Google Fi app. Your family members can also do the same, and this capability comes at no extra charge to your Fi phone plan.
Google also said this week that it would continue to auto-enroll accounts in two-step verification this year after successfully doing it for over 150 million accounts last year. The company reported a 50% decrease in account breaches following the initiative.
Nest Hub (2nd Gen)
The second-generation Nest Hub is an impressive smart display, not only for its excellent audio but also for its ability to remotely track your sleep, complete with insights into what might be preventing you from getting the best sleep at night.
