Today, there were some interesting announcements for Actions on Google, for building your conversational interfaces for the Google Assistant. Among the great news, one item particularly caught my attention: the improved SSML support:

Better SSML: We recently rolled out an update to the web simulator which includes a new SSML audio design experience. We now give you more options for creating natural, quality dialog using newly supported SSML tags, including <prosody>, <emphasis>, <audio> and others. The new tag <par> is coming soon and lets you add mood and richness, so you can play background music and ambient sounds while a user is having a conversation with your app. To help you get started, we’ve added over 1,000 sounds to the sound library. Listen to a brief SSML audio experiment that shows off some of the new features here.

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After deploying in the cloud, there’s a new trend towards programming in the cloud. Although I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, there are a couple of handy tools I’ve been enjoying when working on the Google Cloud Platform.

I had been using the built-in Cloud Shell console, on the Google Cloud console, to have a terminal already pre-configured for my Google Cloud project. It allows you to easily have access to your whole environment, run commands, etc, just like you would from your own computer. The fact that all the command-line tools you can imagine (gradle, maven, gcloud sdk, etc) are already there is helpful, as well as the fact that you are already configured for using other cloud services.

I’ll be back at JavaOne in San Francisco in October to speak about Apache Groovy and Google App Engine.

Apache Groovy

I’ve been involved with the Apache Groovy project for 14 years now, it’s a long time, and it’s interesting to see how the language has evolved over time, how it was influenced by other languages, but also how it influenced those other languages itself! Let’s see which operators or syntax constructs evolved and moved from one to the other.

InfoQ recently released a video from the APIDays conference that took place in Paris last year. I talked about scaling an Open API based web API using Cloud Endpoints, on the Google Cloud platform.

I spoke about the topic a few times, as web APIs is a topic I enjoy, at Nordic APIs, at APIDays, or Devoxx. But it’s great to see the video online. So let me share the slide deck along with the video:

Time flies! Last week was my first “Googleversary”: It’s already been a year since I joined Google Cloud as a Developer Advocate. What a ride it’s been so far!

I announced my move to Google in June last year. And since then got the chance to:

• talk at more than 20 conferences or meetups
• give 3 keynotes
• write 36 articles
• meet with a dozen customers or so
• addressed literally thousands of developers

For some conferences, like Devoxx Belgium, I even spoke 5 times! Or for my trip to Singapore, I had 6 talks or workshops lined up!

Apache Groovy is coming up with a new parser, that supports the Java 8 syntax elements, as well as some new notation and operators of its own (like !in, !instanceof or ?[] for safe navigation with collections, or with ?= for Elvis assignment). I blogged recently about the fact that you can try this new flavor online on this forked Groovy Web Console version, without the need of installing everything. But today I’ll tell you how to build it for yourself in order to run it on your machine.

In two weeks, I’ll be flying east, much further east than I’ve ever been! I’ll visit Singapore! And I’ll have a pretty busy week with several events: conference, meetup, user groups, brown bag lunch… and I’ll talk about Groovy, Machine Learning, and chatbots!

First of all, on Wednesday 31st, I’ll participate to the Singapore Java User Group, where I’ll give an update on Apache Groovy (the latest improvements, new features, the roadmap).

A new Java 8 runtime for Google App Engine standard is coming soon, and is currently in alpha testing. You can request to join the alpha program, if you want to try it out for yourself. But I wanted to let anyone play with it, easily, to see how well the Java 8 APIs work, but also to try some Java 8 syntax too. So here’s a web console where you can do just that!

You know what? It’s Pi Day today! Well, if you follow the American date standard, it’s 3.14 today, a nice approximation of Pi. Last year, in a past life, I had played with Pi already, but this year, my awesome colleagues (Ray, Sandeep, Francesc, Ian) have been working on some very cool demos around Pi, with the “Pi delivery”, at https://pi.delivery/

You can transform the Pi digits in a nice melody, show a D3.js based visualisation of the transitions between digits, you can stream the Pi digits, and more. And you can learn about how it’s been developed on the Google Cloud Platform.

Today was announced the general availability of Google Cloud Endpoints!

Endpoints is the Google Cloud Platform solution for Web API management, which lets you easily protect & secure your API, monitor it, without overhead, and even allows you to implement your API with any language or framework you want.

I’ve spoken about Endpoints a few times already, at Devoxx Belgium, Nordic APIs summit, and APIDays Paris. And you can see the recording of my Nordic APIs appearance, if you want to learn more about Cloud Endpoints: