Working closely with people with disabilities, we’re committed to creating tools that make it easier for everyone to accomplish important everyday tasks – like having conversations, getting work done, and enjoying entertainment. Here are some examples across Android and Pixel:

• Guided Frame, a Pixel accessibility feature that helps people with blindness, low vision, and dexterity-related disabilities take selfies and group photos with more ease

• Lookout, an Android feature that helps people with visual impairments get descriptions of the physical world using their phone's camera and ask follow-up questions by voice or keyboard

• Reading mode on Android, a more accessible reading experience designed for and with people with low vision, blindness, and dyslexia

• Magnifier, a camera-based app for seeing things with detail up close, designed in collaboration with trusted partners at the Royal National Institute of Blind People and National Federation of the Blind

• Sound notifications on Android, a helpful feature that detects and notifies people of critical household sounds, like smoke alarms, doorbells, or crying babies, specifically designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing

• Live Transcribe, a no-cost Android service that provides automatic captions in more than 70 languages to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing participate in conversations

• Conversation mode for Pixel phones, which uses on-device machine learning to help anyone better hear conversations in loud environments by tuning out competing noise

Learn more about accessibility and disability inclusion across our Android and Pixel products here.

When we can’t experience technology in our language, it limits what we can learn, what jobs we can have, what stories we can share, and so much more. That’s why we’re using AI to make the internet and digital tools more accessible and useful for speakers of all languages, all around the world. Here are some of the ways we’re doing it:

• In 2022, we announced the 1,000 Languages Initiative, an ambitious commitment to build an AI model that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages and bring greater inclusion to billions of people in marginalised communities all around the world.
• We’ve built a language model for Bambara, one of West Africa's most widely spoken languages, to make the world’s information more accessible to its speakers.
• We’ve added support for additional languages across many AI-powered products and features, including Live Caption, Google Translate, and Gemini.

Between 2015 and 2022, nearly 3 billion people worldwide came online for the first time. Our Next Billion Users (NBU) initiative aims to understand and meet their unique needs, making technology more helpful, relevant, and inclusive. As part of this effort, we offer Android (Go edition) for affordable phones with limited memory and storage. Because many people in the world have limited or no connectivity, we optimise critical tools like Google Maps so they can still work offline. We also offer services like Vodafone-Idea Phone Line, a toll-free number in India that lets you talk to the Google Assistant without the need for internet or data. And we’ve added text-to-speech capabilities to Google Lens for the nearly 800 million people around the world who struggle to read.

Thanks to feedback from and collaboration with the disability community, we’re working hard to make it easier for everyone to engage and share with the world. For example, quadriplegic video game streamer Lance Carr helped us develop an open-source, hands-free gaming mouse that enables people to control a computer's cursor using head movements and facial gestures. With the participation of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, we’re working with various research partners to create sign language learning and recognition technology for everyone to use, including Deaf children and their parents. Internal testing by blind and low-vision Googlers allowed us to develop Guided Frame, which uses audio cues to help users frame selfies and group photos. And more than 1,100 individuals contributed speech samples to build Project Relate, an Android app that aims to help people with non-standard speech make their voices heard.

We want everyone who interacts with our technology to feel authentically represented and heard. In the case of Google Assistant, that means offering a range of speaking styles to reflect the diversity of users from all backgrounds, while ensuring that the speech recognition function works for everyone. To that end, we’re engaged in community-based participatory research to address bias in voice recognition technology, which has been shown to cause unfair experiences for Black users in the U.S. Our partners for this important project include Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Stanford’s Department of Linguistics, and Black community members.

To feel a true sense of belonging, we all need to see ourselves reflected in the world around us – whether in real life, in media, or online. But historically, image-based technologies have not been designed for people of all skin tones, leading to unfair experiences for people with darker skin.

In 2022, we took steps to address this problem by openly releasing the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale, an alternative 10-shade scale developed by professor and sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk that’s more inclusive than the current tech industry standard. We’re now using the MST Scale to develop better face detection, camera, and image editing products, building on advances we introduced in 2021 with Real Tone. The MST Scale is also helping us create more representative search experiences for everyone. For example, when people search the web for images, they now see an option to further refine their results by skin tone – making it easier for every individual to find what’s useful and relevant to them.

Moving forward, the MST Scale will continue to help us build products and features that reflect and serve everyone.

As humans, we thrive on information that helps us make decisions – decisions that give us control over how we live our lives. And when we want to find information, billions of us turn to core Google tools like Search and Maps. So it’s essential that these products work effectively and equitably for people of all backgrounds and identities.

We work hard to ensure that everyday Google tools connect everyone to the right information for them – so that no matter who you are, you can access relevant information that empowers you to reach your unique goals. That’s why we take action to address imbalances across the web that reflect inequities in society, like limited coverage of women’s sports and insufficient skin tone representation in image results. And we build tools to meet the specific information needs of various communities, especially those that have been overlooked. For example, Qibla Finder uses Google Maps and augmented reality to help anyone identify the fixed direction all Muslims face to pray, wherever they are in the world.

As we continue to enhance Google products with new capabilities powered by generative AI, we focus on inclusiveness from the very start, with the goal of helping everyone access the knowledge and resources they need to shape their own futures.

We want to share information that helps people be thoughtful and intentional about investing in communities they care about. That’s why, on Google products like Maps and Search, business owners can self-identify as community members by adding a business attribute to their profile, such as Asian-owned, Black-owned, Latino-owned, women-owned, LGBTQ+ owned, disabled-owned, or Indigenous-owned. This makes it easier for customers to find and support them. Businesses can also use attributes to self-identify as inclusive spaces. By learning that a destination is wheelchair-accessible, is LGBTQ-friendly, or features gender-neutral restrooms, customers gain the information they need to make the right decisions for them.

Google is committed to health equity for all, and that starts with giving everyone access to the information they need to make decisions about their physical and mental wellbeing. Here are some examples of the work we’re doing:

• THE-IQ, a health equity programme from YouTube Health and the Kaiser Family Foundation that provides underrepresented communities with resources and support to create high-quality, informative YouTube videos to help improve health outcomes
• Stress detection tools for Fitbit that help everyone manage stress and better understand their physical, emotional, and mental health
• Expanded access for more Fitbit users around the world to key metrics and personalised insights, including changes and trends in breathing rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, and more
• An optional fall detection feature for Google Pixel Watch, which uses motion sensors and on-device machine learning to alert emergency services when wearers don’t respond after a hard fall
• A new partnership with New Zealand’s ThroughLine, the largest verified network of mental health and crisis helplines around the world, to bring people lifesaving resources at critical moments on Google Search