TikTok has to be the biggest social media phenomenon of 2020s. It was originally known as Musical.ly and it has brought the resurgence of the short video format after the rise and fall of Vine in the previous decade. TikTok has also spawned many clones and one of them is YouTube Shorts, a section of YouTube that focuses on videos which are less than minute in length. As it is getting popular so Google has decided to add some more feature similar to TikTok. The latest one of them is green screen.
As announced by YouTube, the new Green Screen feature is the newest way of remixing a video on YouTube Shorts. You can use it on any of the existing YouTube video or short and a photo or video in your gallery and record yourself with whatever color that is being keyed out. You can use or mute audio from original source. The end product will be a Short video so it has to be 60 seconds or less.
In order to use this feature all you have to do is to head over to Create > Green Screen under any video which you are watching, or you can look for the option in 3-dot menu in your Short view. It is on iOS at the moment and Android users will get it in coming months. At the moment most of the Shorts is nothing but TikTok reuploads so by adding the creator features to the app could boost growth of an exclusive community of creators.

Captions are considered as one of the most handy features as we are not always in a position where we can hear the audio of any video and captions can save your day in that regard. With captions you can watch a video even your phone is muted. The company has confirmed that YouTube is now doubling down on captions adding the transcripts and auto-translations for videos you watch on your phone.
When it comes to transcripts, they will be auto-generated by using Google speech recognition models like automatic captions with added difference that allow you to read them down in the list from similar to auto-transcripts in Google Recorder app. Like auto-captions dont expect these to work flawlessly especially when it launches. It works brilliantly in Google Recorder but videos can be more of mixed bag and you may get either perfect transcripts or really low quality depending on the video.
Now you can have auto-translated captions and it works exactly the way you are thinking. If a video has got captions you can go into settings and tap on Auto-translate and select your preferred language and then you will have subtitles adapted to your language. This feature is available for long time on web version but its arrival on mobile version is long overdue. Auto-translated captions will be available in 16 languages initially with Ukrainian language joining the list next month.

YouTube Music’s playlists are considered as one of its biggest draws and it appears that Google is testing a UI redesign for them in its mobile app. A user from France has shared on Reddit that the YouTube playlist interface on his Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 and it has been changed significantly. And it seems to be a test for further update.
In the new user interface the top of the playlist shows name of the person who is its creator and when the playlist was last updated. The cover art has been centralized and below that is the name of playlist in large font. Up next is the list of other buttons like download, add to library, share, play and overflow appearing in straight line. The shuffle feature seems to be missing from the list. The changes have appeared in the playlist section and not for the albums. In the earlier testing phase it is still unclear if the changes will be made only to the playlists or of it will extend to other sections of YouTube Music. With the changes the user interface has got a clean look with control options in single line thus making it simple to navigate. The changes will also apply to self-made of community generated playlists as well as YouTube Music’s creations.

If you have been part of any organization that operates on WhatsApp you can probably testify that 256 participant limit is a bit annoying one about this platform. It forces the management with loads of members to spread the resources thin, thus creating as well as managing multiple groups. Now it will be changed as Meta owned platform gets an update that will double participant limit on each of your group. WhatsApp has recently announced a series of new features arriving on the service. including expanding the group chat sizes. Now users will be able to add up to 512 people to a group. The feature is not widely available at the moment but it is slowly trickling to the users, It is still very far from 200,000 participants limit available on Telegram users through subgroups but still it is a welcoming step taken by them.
WhatsApp is also working on Communities which is another way of managing the group chats efficiently. A community will appear as new tab within the app. It will have many groups, letting the admins to send announcements as well as updates to all the participants in a single go. WhatsApp communities has been in the pipeline since last year but official announcement came last month. Aside from these in-progress features, WhatsApp has rolled out two new additions i.e. reactions and an increased file sharing size limit. Now you can send up to 2GB of files at once on WhatsApp which is a massive jump from the previous limit of 100MB. Reactions allow the users to respond directly to any message with six different emojis without crowding the chat with individual replies.

Google has said to its Translate users that an upcoming policy which was changed in 2020 may finally be taking place in 2022. This is not the first time the company was late to its own party. Few years ago it is reported on a warning prompt users were seeing on Translate telling them that the search history on the service would soon only be available for those who are logged into their Google account. Now users can save individual searches to individual devices which was better for privacy but not so good for continuity across the platforms.
Until yesterday people began collecting tips about new prompt telling users to either back up their Translate search history to their Google account, manage their activity logging or continue by using Translate without an account. Users can temporarily use app without an account by hitting their account avatar located at the top-right corner and then hit the down arrow next to their account information in order to switch it up. Id people want to sync their search history to cloud, they will have to make sure that the Web & App Activity control setting is turned on in Google account settings. Cloud synced Translate histories sync every few hours so that the locally-recorded histories remain local and up-to-date.

Spotify Stations is there for quite some time now and its app is offering users with a streamlined experience designed to mimic the sort of hands-off listening that you have get from a traditional radio station. it has gone through substantial changes as it has been seen come to new markets. Unfortunately now it is time to take this station down as Spotify shares word with testers that is shuttering Stations.
Spotify inform the users that they will be able to import their existing stations into the primary app and will continue to listen to them there. What is a bit confusing here is that what this move will spell for the creation of future stations and if we will see all old functionality migrate over Spotify proper. The fans of Stations have praised its ability to generate the radio feeds which are based on multiple artists or tracks rather than focusing on a single point of inspiration.

In the consumer tech market, Google and Amazon are termed as opposing camps. The reality on the other hand for the many shoppers who are building their smart homes up is that they are mixing as well as matching their Ring doorbells with their Nest Thermostats or putting an Echo in one room and Google Assistant speaker in the other.
Google is pushing the 2021 model Nest products as having best compatibility with Alexa for live view streaming but users can pair up their older Nest cameras and their thermostats for voice control. There are no restrictions Which Nest Thermostat models can be integrated with Alexa skill. Only Nest Doorbell will support doorbell press announcements. Nest device owners who are looking forward to use Alexa can install the skill for free from Amazon then go to Google Home app settings on a managing device and hit partner Connections, then Amazon Alexa.