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We’ve all been there. Compromising security for convenience, we put our personal information at risk with poor password habits. One in four Americans use common passwords—like Abc123, Password1111, and P@ssw0rd. Sixty-six percent of Americans admit to using the same weak password across multiple sites, which makes all those accounts vulnerable. And every day, new data breaches publicly expose millions of usernames and passwords.

Until passwords become a thing of the past (trust us, we’re working on it), there’s a simple and secure solution: use a password manager, like the one built into your Google Account and Google Chrome. It generates strong, unique passwords for all your online accounts, auto-fills them as you sign in, and helps keep them safe in a central place. 

Today we’re launching the Password Checkup—a new feature built into our password manager that checks the strength and security of all of your saved passwords, tells you if we find they’ve been compromised (for example, in a breach), and gives you personalized, actionable recommendations when needed. 

With a single click, the Password Checkup tells you if: 

• Your passwords have been compromised in a third-party breach. We’ve found more than 4 billion usernames and passwords that have been exposed due to third-party breaches. If any of these are yours, attackers could have these passwords and access your information. 

• Your passwords are being reused across different sites. If someone gets access to a password that you reuse on multiple sites, they can use it to sign into your other accounts as well.

• Your passwords should be strengthened. Weak passwords can be easily guessed by attackers, putting your personal information at risk. 

Coming soon: Always-on protection with Chrome

The Password Checkup is built from our Chrome extension launched earlier this year, which alerts you if your username or password has been compromised in a third-party data breach. The extension has been downloaded more than 1 million times, with nearly half of those users receiving a warning for a compromised password. Later this year, we’ll build Password Checkup technology directly into Chrome for everyone—so you get real time protection as you type your password without needing to install a separate extension. 

Features like Security Checkup, password manager and now the Password Checkup are all examples of how we're continuously working to make your online experience safer and easier—not just on Google, but across the web. So the next time you’re struggling to remember how many !’s and 1’s you added to your last password, we can help you with that. 

I didn't know what recovery meant until a friend asked me if I was still "in recovery." Confused, I responded, “Yes, I’m still not drinking, if that's what you mean.” I know now what I didn’t know then: Recovery means life after substance abuse. It means having a clear mind and a healthy body. It means having the foresight to say no to alcohol. It means having the mental clarity to thrive at work and the desire to live a fuller, happier, complete life. 

As someone who has struggled with addiction and embarked on a journey toward recovery, I am so proud that Google is marking National Recovery Month with a new site, Recover Together. I participate in a recovery group at Google and know how important it is for this community to be connected. As part of Google’s ongoing efforts to combat the opioid crisis, today we’re taking an additional step to support those in recovery.

Too many of us have experienced firsthand the devastating impact of addiction—with our friends, colleagues, family members and loved ones. From the first time I filled my water bottle with alcohol and brought it to school at only 14 years old, to the many times I blacked out and woke up in the back seat of my car in surprising locations, I know how deeply addiction affected my life and worried my family.

More than 21 million Americans struggle with substance use. But it is treatable: An estimated 1 out of 14 American adults is in recovery. In fact, people come to Google every day to seek information on addiction treatment, prevention and recovery. Just last month, we saw an all-time high in search interest for “rehab near me,” “addiction treatment near me” and “how to help an addict.”

Starting today, you can come to Google to find recovery resources all in one place, beginning with a video series from those in recovery. I felt less alone when hearing others share their stories, and I am grateful to be able to do the same here.

Finding recovery is a personal journey, and I am so grateful to work for a company that is making resources available to those who need them. In addition to these new tools, the site points to many other resources for those seeking treatment, including a self-assessment screener from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and state-specific Helpline resources and hotlines. 

To anyone at the beginning stages of recovery: This process is hard and tiring and challenging and you do not need to figure this all out alone. From the moment I first connected to the Employee Assistance Program counselor at Google who helped me confront the reality of my addiction, my life has changed in ways that at one time seemed unimaginable. I teach yoga. I run marathons. My life has been enriched by others in the recovery community. My sorrow has been replaced with a joy I never thought possible. And today, my hope is that anyone seeking recovery can find the same help and resources through Google I wanted so many years ago. Recovery is difficult, and it is so much better when we’re all in it together.

Have you ever wondered how new features are developed at Google? We start with a problem that needs to be solved, then consider what the best solution might be, so that our products can be more helpful. And, when we can, we like to get feedback from you (and Googlers themselves) before we officially launch so we can refine and improve.

Beta Features is new from Play Books, and it lets you test out experimental features on the web. This project originated with Dan Kimberg, a software engineer who joined the Play Books team to perfect a product he’d been a longtime fan of. Self-proclaimed bookworm and lifetime lover of literature, Dan was eager to personalize his library and make it easier to browse and organize his collection of books. He knew that other readers out there probably felt the same way—so he got to work.

These features may lack a bit of polish; they might evolve, improve, disappear or transform into new Play Books product updates. They’re experimental, and Dan and the team want to hear what’s most helpful to you. We sat down with Dan to learn more about the inspiration behind Beta Features.

What led you to the Play Books team?

I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, but I wasn’t always working in the world of books. I've been a software engineer at Google for eight years on different teams. And before coming to Google, I spent nearly 20 years as a researcher in cognitive neuroscience, using brain imaging to try to understand how the mind works. 

Before joining the Play Books team I filed around 50 feature requests, and I'd been thinking idle thoughts about how technology could improve reading, listening, (and writing) since I was a teenager. 

What inspired you to develop Beta Features?

As a constant reader, I used to go on vacation and pack 20 books because I didn’t know what I’d end up wanting to read. Throughout my years of reading physical books, there were some fundamental frustrations that inspired me to think differently about how technology can make reading more enjoyable. Physical books don’t give you the flexibility of selecting the right font size for you, not all printed books are well bound, page size varies and long lines of text may not be conducive to your reading style. Now, with the help of technology, I can try to solve some of those frustrations for others (and now I can bring as many books as I want on vacation).

Which Beta Features are available now to test out—and which is your favorite?

First, there’s Custom Shelves—my personal favorite and the most frequently requested feature from our users. It lets you organize your shelves in a more useful and personal way. For example, I’ve titled one of my Custom Shelves "Re-read me"—this is for books I've read but would like to revisit, so they don't get lost in the jumble of other books.

You’ll also be able to search quickly for a particular book within your library, or sort your library using different criteria—like author, title, last read and price. The last Beta Feature is a new shelf called Ready to Read, which shows you the books you haven’t finished yet to help you quickly pick up where you left off. 

How can you get started testing?

Head to play.google.com/books, click the Settings button, and select “Beta Features” to get started. You can enable all features or just the ones you find most useful. If you’d like to submit feedback on the Beta Features after you’ve tried them out, or want to send us a feature request you’ve been dreaming up, click on the Settings icon and then select Send Feedback.

A quick, informative conversation with an operator during an emergency call is critical, but in some cases, people are unable to verbally communicate, whether they’re injured, in a dangerous situation or have a speech impairment.

Tapping on the “Medical,” “Fire” or “Police” buttons during an emergency call will convey the type of emergency to the operator through an automated voice service. That service works on device, which means the information stays between you and emergency services, and the service functions whether or not you have a data connection. After you activate the service, you can always speak directly to the operator as well.

Your location, which comes from your phone’s GPS, is often already shared with the operator when you make a 911 call. This new feature provides similar location information through the automated voice service, along with the caller’s plus code, which is another reliable way to help emergency services accurately locate them. Like the rest of the content shared with the operator using this feature, your  location stays between them and emergency services. 

This feature will become available in the U.S. over the coming months, starting with Pixel phones. We’ve been collecting feedback from public safety organizations, including the National Emergency Number Association, to make this feature as helpful as possible, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration with the emergency services community to make people safer.

Editor's note: This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission landing on the moon. As part of Google's celebration of this historic event, we asked X's Astro Teller to share his thoughts on moonshots. This post was also published on X's blog.

In the fall of 2010, I asked Larry Page a series of questions to find out what he wanted X’s purpose to be. “Is X a research center?” No, Larry said. “A philanthropic organization?” No. “An incubator?” No. “Are we solving Google’s problems?” No. Eventually, I asked, “Are we taking moonshots?” And he smiled and said, “YES.” 

While I confess I hadn’t fully thought through the question when I asked it, the word’s sense of audacity and extreme difficulty spoke to both of us. And it was the seed of X’s identity as a moonshot factory, with a mission of repeatedly developing far-out, sci-fi-sounding technologies that might someday make the world a radically better place. So as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission this month, here’s some of the other inspiration I’ve taken from the teams who put a person on the moon. 

Optimism and perspective-shifting as a strategy 

Our use of the term “moonshot” isn’t literal; it’s more of an emotional blueprint. A moonshot is about looking beyond where you can actually see and envisioning an answer that doesn't seem reasonable—and pursuing it anyway. It’s about doing things that sound undoable but if done could redefine humanity. 

In the early 1960’s, spacecraft for moon landings didn’t exist. There were no spacesuits, no space snacks, no computers for space navigation—plenty of reasons, in other words, to scoff at President Kennedy’s bold vision. But he made a powerful choice: to be an optimist and ask for something that, if possible at all, would require a radical reimagining of what space flight could be.  

Perspective-shifting is one of X’s most deeply held principles. It’s not just about having an idea that sounds like science fiction (though we do reject a lot of ideas for not sounding impossible enough!). We look for a new way of thinking that avoids the usual methods and obstacles—like beaming Internet from balloons or free-space-optical stations rather than running fiber-optic cable through jungles and mountains. When you let your imagination run free and then run experiments to see whether your hypothesis could actually work, you can uncover surprising new approaches.  

10X can be easier than 10 percent

Growing up there were three events I wished I had been part of. The first was the work led by Alan Turing and others during WWII to build the first real computer and the decryption process that led to modern computer science. The second, which my grandfather was a part of, was the Manhattan Project; work on the atomic bomb gave rise to the first electronic general purpose computer. The third was the Apollo space missions. These three special gatherings symbolized for me that the seemingly impossible can happen when passionate and talented people come together with urgency and determination. 

The secret? It’s easier to get people to work on making something 10X better than to get them to help make it 10 percent better. Huge problems fire up our hearts as well as our minds. When you’re aiming for a 10X gain, you can’t just slog through it. You have to find whole new ways of doing things, and lean on bravery and creativity—the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a person on the moon. 

Cognitive diversity is the key to creativity

More than 400,000 people made the Apollo mission possible—from mechanical engineers to fashion designers, with teams reaching from New England to California. Behind the millions of rocket components were many more millions of prototypes and experiments—all the rough ideas and uncomfortable moments necessary to solve problems no one had ever faced before. This was creativity in action, at a massive scale. 

The lone inventor having a eureka moment is largely a myth; innovation comes from great teams where everyone feels comfortable raising questions and sharing their views. The more people a project has from a wide range of backgrounds and communities, the more fresh perspectives and creative ideas we can generate—and the better we’ll all be. At X, that’s why former rocket scientists work alongside concert pianists and puppeteers, and marine biologists mingle with physicists and machine learning experts. 

Moonshots are a mindset 

“There was no choice but to be pioneers.” 

That’s how Margaret Hamilton describes working on the software that put us on the moon. Margaret led the team that developed the onboard flight software for all of NASA’s manned Apollo missions, including Apollo 11’s historic moon landing.

With the anniversary of that moon landing approaching, Google set out to shine a light on Margaret’s influence on Apollo, and on the field of software engineering itself. The tribute was created by positioning over 107,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 1.4-square-mile portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.

At the MIT Instrumentation Lab in the 1960s, Margaret was working on code for the Apollo Guidance Computer. A working mom, she sometimes did what a lot of us do: she took her daughter, Lauren, to the office. Margaret would often test programs in the simulator, and Lauren liked to play astronaut like her mom. One day, Lauren crashed the simulator after she pressed a button that set off a prelaunch program while the mission was in mid-flight. 

Margaret didn’t scold Lauren. Instead, she was struck with a thought: “What if an astronaut did the same thing during a real mission?” Margaret lobbied to add code that would prevent a system crash from actually happening if he did. 

This way of thinking came to define Margaret’s work. She’d always ask, “What if something you never thought would happen, happens?” Then, she’d develop and test a system that would be prepared for that scenario.

Her “what if” mindset was crucial throughout the Apollo missions, where the software had to work perfectly, and had to work the first time, in space. Keep in mind, this was at a time when software engineering literally wasn’t even a thing yet—Margaret herself coined the phrase “software engineering” while working on Apollo.

On the second day of I/O 2019, two bands took the stage—with a little help from machine learning. Both YACHT and The Flaming Lips worked with Google engineers who say that machine learning could change the way artists create music.

“Any time there has been a new technological development, it has made its way into music and art,” says Adam Roberts, a software engineer on the Magenta team. “The history of the piano, essentially, went from acoustic to electric to the synthesizer, and now there are ways to play it directly from your computer. That just happens naturally. If it’s a new technology, people figure out how to use it in music.”

Magenta, which started nearly three years ago, is an open-source research project powered by TensorFlow that explores the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. Machine learning is a process of teaching computers to recognize patterns, with a goal of letting them learn by example rather than constantly receiving input from a programmer. So with music, for example, you can input two types of melodies, then use machine learning to combine them in a novel way.

But the Magenta team isn’t just teaching computers to make music—instead, they’re working hand-in-hand with musicians to help take their art in new directions. YACHT was one of Magenta’s earliest collaborators; the trio came to Google to learn more about how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning in their upcoming album.

The band first took all 82 songs from their back catalog and isolated each part, from bass lines to vocal melodies to drum rhythms; they then took those isolated parts and broke them up into four-bar loops. Then, they put those loops into the machine learning model, which put out new melodies based on their old work. They did a similar process with lyrics, using their old songs plus other material they considered inspiring. The final task was to pick lyrics and melodies that made sense, and pair them together to make a song.

“They used these tools to push themselves out of their comfort zone,” says Jesse Engel, a research scientist on the Magenta team. “They imposed some rules on themselves that they had to use the outputs of the model to some extent, and it helped them make new types of music.”

Claire Evans, the singer of YACHT, explained the process during a presentation at I/O. “Using machine learning to make a song with structure, with a beginning, middle and end, is a little bit still out of our reach,” she explained. “But that’s a good thing. The melody was the model’s job, but the arrangement and performance was entirely our job.”

The Flaming Lips’ use of Magenta is a lot more recent; the band started working with the Magenta team to prepare for their performance at I/O. The Magenta team showcased all their projects to the band, who were drawn to one in particular: Piano Genie, which was dreamed up by a graduate student, Chris Donahue, who was a summer intern at Google. They decided to use Piano Genie as the basis for a new song to be debuted on the I/O stage.

Piano Genie distills 88 notes on a piano to eight buttons, which you can push to your heart’s content to make piano music. In what Jesse calls “an initial moment of inspiration,” someone put a piece of wire inside a piece of fruit, and turned fruit into the buttons for Piano Genie. “Fruit can be used as a capacitive sensor, like the screen on your phone, so you can detect whether or not someone is touching the fruit,” Jesse explains. “They were playing these fruits just by touching these different fruits, and they got excited by how that changed the interaction.”

Wayne Coyne, the singer of The Flaming Lips, noted during an I/O panel that a quick turnaround time, plus close collaboration with Google, gave them the inspiration to think outside the box. “For me, the idea that we’re not playing it on a keyboard, we’re not playing it on a guitar, we’re playing it on fruit, takes it into this other realm,” he said.

During their performance that night, Steven Drozd from The Flaming Lips, who usually plays a variety of instruments, played a “magical bowl of fruit” for the first time. He tapped each fruit in the bowl, which then played different musical tones, “singing” the fruit’s own name. With help from Magenta, the band broke into a brand-new song, “Strawberry Orange.”

The Flaming Lips also got help from the audience: At one point, they tossed giant, blow-up “fruits” into the crowd, and each fruit was also set up as a sensor, so any audience member who got their hands on one played music, too. The end result was a cacophonous, joyous moment when a crowd truly contributed to the band’s sound.

You can learn more about the "Fruit Genie" and how to build your own at g.co/magenta/fruitgenie.

Though the Magenta team collaborated on a much deeper level with YACHT, they also found the partnership with The Flaming Lips to be an exciting look toward the future. “The Flaming Lips is a proof of principle of how far we’ve come with the technologies,” Jesse says. “Through working with them we understood how to make our technologies more accessible to a broader base of musicians. We were able to show them all these things and they could just dive in and play with it.”

This April, Googlers Peter McDade and Clay McCauley spent an entire day trying to keep a $300 car running. No, they weren’t stuck on a nightmare of a road trip. They were competing in the 24 Hours of Lemons race, the culmination of eight months of blood, sweat and tears—and a whole lot of grease.

Peter and Clay work at a Google data center in Moncks Corner, S.C., located about 20 miles from Charleston. Like many Googlers, the two find joy in taking things apart and putting them back together to see how they work. The data center has a maker space for employees, where colleagues tinker with brewing, electronics and 3D printers, as well as an auto repair station, with a car lift and tools to let people work on their vehicles. But their “lemons” race was way more than an after-work hangout.

Here’s how a lemons race works: Participants must team up in groups, and each group must spend no more than $500 on a car. Then they fix it up, give it a wacky paint job and race them. This particular race, nicknamed Southern Discomfort, is a full-day race at the Carolina Motorsports Park; it’s one of the 24 Hours of Lemons races that take place across the U.S. throughout the year. Peter, Clay and two other friends each took one-hour shifts driving, while the rest of the group stayed on call as a pit crew, taking action in case anything broke. Which, given the price of the car, was pretty likely. “The point is not to win,” Peter says. “The point is to finish and have fun.”

Peter first came up with the idea of participating in the race, and spread the word at work. Clay was immediately interested and signed up to help, but didn’t think it would work out. “I was thinking, Oh, it probably isn’t that serious, it probably will never happen,'” Clay says. But they stuck with it once other friends outside of Google stepped up to join.

Their first challenge? Find a car for under $500. It took them months, but Clay ended up finding a listing for a $300 car, which had been sitting in a field for a long time. “It was actually sinking into the ground, it had been there for so long,” Clay says. “It had grass overgrown around it, and it had mold growing on the paint.” Though the car barely rolled, thanks to a badly bent wheel, they decided they could figure something out.

That was the beginning of five months of work. They stripped the car down, fixed elements like the brakes and the wheels and added required safety features like a roll cage. At first, they tinkered with the car on site at the data center, but soon moved it to Peter’s driveway, where it remained until the race. They spent Tuesday and Thursday evenings, plus weekends, working to get it in shape, and kept track of what they had to do with Google Sheets.

On the big day, other teams didn’t even expect them to finish because of issues with the car’s fuel system and what Peter calls “electronic gremlins.” But they did, and they bested even their own expectations. The team, nicknamed “The Slow and Spontaneous” as a nod to the “Fast and the Furious” movies, made it the full 24 hours, doing 309 laps and finishing in 49th place out of 84 participants.

Emerging victorious wasn’t really the point, though. It was to work on a project with friends, and learn new skills to boot. “We’re not satisfied with something being broken and having to throw it away and buying something new,” Peter says. “It’s better to get something you know you might be able to fix, trying to find it, and realizing that yeah, I could fail, but if I fail, I’m going to learn something.” And they’ll apply those lessons to their next lemons race, taking place this fall.

Most aspects of life involve communicating with others—and being understood by those people as well. Many of us take this understanding for granted, but you can imagine the extreme difficulty and frustration you’d feel if people couldn’t easily understand the way you talk or express yourself. That’s the reality for millions of people living with speech impairments caused by neurologic conditions such as stroke, ALS, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injuries and Parkinson's.

To help solve this problem, the Project Euphonia team—part of our AI for Social Good program—is using AI to improve computers’ abilities to understand diverse speech patterns, such as impaired speech. We’ve partnered with the non-profit organizations ALS Therapy Development Institute (ALS TDI) and ALS Residence Initiative (ALSRI) to record the voices of people who have ALS, a neuro-degenerative condition that can result in the inability to speak and move. We collaborated closely with these groups to learn about the communication needs of people with ALS, and worked toward optimizing AI based algorithms so that mobile phones and computers can more reliably transcribe words spoken by people with these kinds of speech difficulties. To learn more about how our partnership with ALS TDI started, read this article from Senior Director, Clinical Operations Maeve McNally and ALS TDI Chief Scientific Officer Fernando Vieira.

To do this, Google software turns the recorded voice samples into a spectrogram, or a visual representation of the sound. The computer then uses common transcribed spectrograms to "train" the system to better recognize this less common type of speech. Our AI algorithms currently aim to accommodate individuals who speak English and have impairments typically associated with ALS, but we believe that our research can be applied to larger groups of people and to different speech impairments.

In addition to improving speech recognition, we are also training personalized AI algorithms to detect sounds or gestures, and then take actions such as generating spoken commands to Google Home or sending text messages. This may be particularly helpful to people who are severely disabled and cannot speak.

The video below features Dimitri Kanevsky, a speech researcher at Google who learned English after he became deaf as a young child in Russia. Dimitri is using Live Transcribe with a customized model trained uniquely to recognize his voice. The video also features collaborators who have ALS like Steve Saling—diagnosed with ALS 13 years ago—who use non-speech sounds to trigger smart home devices and facial gestures to cheer during a sports game.

We’re excited to see where this can take us, and we need your help. These improvements to speech recognition are only possible if we have many speech samples to train the system. If you have slurred or hard to understand speech, fill out this short form to volunteer and record a set of phrases. Anyone can also donate to or volunteer with our partners, ALS TDI and the ALS Residence Initiative. The more speech samples our system hears, the more potential we have to make progress and apply these tools to better support everyone, no matter how they communicate.