Screen brightness adjustment using machine learning

Mobile devices, e.g., smartphones, tablets, etc., often include a light sensor that senses ambient light. Data from this sensor is used to set the screen brightness. During ordinary usage of such devices, the light sensor sometimes gets covered, e.g., by the user\u27s fingers, which leads to a quick decrease in screen brightness. This makes for a poor user experience. This disclosure describes machine learning techniques that determine whether a detected change in ambient light is due to a true decrease in ambient light conditions or due to an occlusion of the light sensor. Screen brightness adjustments can be made on such determination

Smart assistance for meetings

The described techniques provide smart assistance to video conference meeting attendees. With user permission, such assistance includes replaying, transcribing, translating and/or summarizing all or part of a meeting, interpreting specified voice commands, and identifying topics or items of interest from the meeting recording or transcript. For example, meeting participants can provide keywords corresponding to topics of interest and seek notifications when such topics are discussed in the meeting. Also, users can query meeting recordings or transcripts for topics of interest or meeting action items. Present techniques can be utilized for video conferences, audio conferences, recorded talks, and face-to-face meetings

Polite mode for a virtual assistant

The use of imperative statements and commands for a voice-activated virtual assistant can set an inappropriate example to children and can potentially lead them to imitate such language in normal conversation. However, current voice-activated virtual assistants are not configured to recognize polite language which can lead to unintended responses. This disclosure describes a virtual assistant that can be configured in a polite mode. The disclosed techniques may be utilized to configure a virtual assistant such that it is responsive only to polite queries. Polite mode is enabled by use of voice stress analysis, sentiment analysis module and natural language understanding (NLU) techniques that are utilized to annotate words/phrases from a query and to determine whether the query is polite

Automatic correction of timestamp and location information in digital images

Image storage and sharing services permit users to store and share images. Such applications typically organize images chronologically. However, chronological organization fails if the timestamp or location information stored in the image metadata (e.g., EXIF) is incorrect. Incorrect information is a common problem, e.g., when images are shared via messaging or social media, the shared image may have the time of sharing, not the time of capture. In another example, geolocation data may be deleted when an image is shared. Further, image timestamps can be inaccurate when multiple users contribute images to a single shared album from cameras that are not time synchronized. This disclosure describes techniques to determine the time and/or location of image capture by evaluating the image in the context of other images. Images with trustworthy time information are identified. Images with less trustworthy information are analyzed for content, and a determination is made as to whether they are ahead or behind a trustworthy image. In this manner, techniques of this disclosure enable chronological ordering of images

Restricting access to files by application programs

This disclosure describes techniques to enable users to restrict private data from display. Such private data can include images, videos, documents, and other files, by a user device. Private files can be manually or automatically designated, and the content of these files is hidden from user interfaces provided by application programs. Automatic designation is performed using user-permitted techniques for automatic analysis of files. Further, a variety of settings allow the user to control access to private data for display by designated application programs. Such features restrict another user that is viewing a device screen from viewing private data. Described techniques provide these features in ways that reduce the impact on usability, where authenticated access to private data is easily permitted via displayed prompts

Improved White Balance Based on Multiple Photos of Same Subjects

This disclosure describes techniques to perform improved automatic white balance correction to digital images in a user’s collection. With user permission, multiple photos that depict the same subjects are found in the user’s collection in photos depicting a variety of different lighting and environments, and an automatic white balance correction is determined based on the multiple photos. The white balance correction can be automatically applied to new photos and/or older photos in a user’s collection. Such features enable automatic white balance to more accurately applied and produce higher quality photos with accurate colors

Selective lifelogging to record missed events of interest

A user can sometimes miss content or events of interest due to distraction or inattention. Rewinding and replaying to view the missed content or event may not be possible when the missed situation is live and not pre-recorded. Further, the user may view the content as a real-world experience rather than via a computing device. This disclosure describes techniques that make it possible to replay moments from the immediate past, thus enabling an experience for the real world similar to that of the rewind functionality for recorded content. With the user’s permission, a recording is triggered when it is determined that the user is likely to miss an upcoming event of interest, enabling the user to retrieve and play the missed event. A trained event interpretation model is used to determine the event of interest from the recorded data

Inserting multimedia content captured by one device into a document on another device

Many applications include capabilities that allow users to capture and insert multimedia content into a document by capturing it with the device camera. However, document creation and editing tasks are often performed on traditional desktop or laptop computers on which the camera is typically positioned in a fixed location above the screen. Capturing multimedia content that includes matter other than that located directly in front of the computer screen is awkward and often infeasible. On the other hand, integrating multimedia content captured by another device into a document being edited on the separate device requires a cumbersome and inefficient multi-step process. This disclosure describes techniques that enable a user to insert into a document multimedia content, such as photos, videos, etc., captured using a camera of any device, including a device other than the one on which the content is being inserted. The techniques provide a simple process to insert multimedia content captured by other devices

Transferable Deep Links

The disclosure describes techniques to automatically generate shareable deep links from applications and/or web pages. A system level application programming interface (API) provides automatically transferable deep links from application or web pages. Per the techniques, applications or web pages store a given state along with an associated hash. When a link to a shopping cart is shared by a user, the recipient sees the same content as the sender which is enabled by the use of the associated hash. While the applications or web pages control shareable status, the sharable deep link techniques are provided via a browser or operating system and are made available system-wide