Technology

YouTube today announced a suite of new features designed to offer creators and their fans new ways to contribute to charitable causes. This includes beta versions of new fundraising and campaign matching tools, as well as a variation of YouTubeSuper Chat service, called &Super Chat for Good.&

Explains the company, YouTube creators have already been using its video platform to raise awareness about causes they care about, and bring their communities together. The launch of YouTube Giving, as this combined toolset is called, will now allow them to do more by making it easier for fans to donate to over 1 million nonprofits.

With Fundraisers, YouTube creators and qualifying U.S. nonprofits (registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits) will be able to create fundraising campaigns that are embedded next to their YouTube videos.

Directly beneath the video, viewers will see a &Donate& button that will allow them contribute to the campaign. YouTube says it will handle the logistics and payment processing.

This is rolling out now to a small group of U.S. and Canadian creators during this beta. One example, live now, is aHope for Paws Fundraiserthatraising funds towards animal rescue and recovery.

During the beta, YouTube will cover all transaction fees, allowing 100% of donations to reach the nonprofits.

Community Fundraisers, now launching in beta to U.S. creators, will allow YouTubers to team up together to co-host the same fundraiser. The feature set here is similar to regular fundraisers, but is designed so the fundraiser appears at the same time across all participants& videos. It will also display how much money all communities have raised together.

This is being kicked off with a group fundraiser by a dozen gaming creators who will raise money from their 37 million subscribers for St. Jude ChildrenResearch Hospital.

Campaign Matching has yet to launch, but will soon allow creators to organize fundraisers where they can receive matching pledges from other creators, brands, and businesses to increase how much they&re able to raise.

The matching pledges and who they&re from will also be displayed as part of this feature. This is expected to arrive in the weeks ahead, says YouTube.

Another new addition leverages YouTubeexisting Super Chat system, which allows fans to pay to have their comments highlighted. In Super Chat for Good, 100% of viewers& Super Chat purchases will go towards the nonprofit the creator is supporting.

YouTube says it will take in feedback from the community and expand the features to more creators over the next few months.

Online fundraising is a popular activity today across sites like GoFundMe, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon.Facebook also entered the market a couple of years ago. In mid-2016 it rolled out the ability for its users to raise funds for nonprofits they support, before later expanding this fundraising toolsetset to live video,and broadening the types of fundraisers people could host.

Facebook charges platform fees on some of these fundraisers, except for those for charitable organizations.

YouTube says it also won&t charge fees during the beta, but declined to tell us what its plans for fees are when the beta period wraps.

The company this year has been expanding the types of things creators can do with their videos, in the face of increased competition from Facebook Watch and AmazonTwitch. Earlier this summer, YouTube introduced a suite of other features likechannel memberships, merchandise shelves, marketing partnerships via FameBit and the launch of &Premieres,& to offer creators a middle ground between live streaming and pre-recorded video.

Twitter continues to roll out new policies aimed at increasing transparency, particularly around political advertising.

Amidst ongoing concerns about Russian election interference and misinformation on social media, the company recently announced political ad guidelines and launched an Ads Transparency Center where you can find more information about advertisers.

Initially, however, Twitterstricter standards were limited to ads for U.S. federal election candidates and campaigns. Now itannounced a policy around the broader category of &issue ads.&

In a blog post, Twittervice president of trust and safety Del Harvey and its general manager of revenue product Bruce Falck said the policy affects two categories:

* Ads that refer to an election or a clearly identified candidate, or * Ads that advocate for legislative issues of national importance

In both cases, advertisers will need to apply for certification, which involves verifying their identity and location in the United States. Like election ads, issue ads will be labeled as such in the Twitter timeline, and they&ll allow users to click through and learn more about the advertiser. They&ll also be included in the Ads Transparency center.

As examples of the kinds of issues that would be covered, Harvey and Falck cited &abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade,& though they also said that list will likely evolve over time.

News organizations that want to run ads around their political coverage can apply for an exemption. (Since the definition of what is and isn&t a news organization can be blurry, there are specific criteria that they&d need to meet, like providing editorial staff information online and not being &dedicated to advocating on a single issue.&)

&We don&t believe that news organizations running ads on Twitter that report on these issues, rather than advocate for or against them, should be subject to this policy,& Harvey and Falck wrote.

Twitter says it will start enforcing the policy (which, to be clear, is currently U.S.-only) on September 30.

The Google Assistant just got more useful for multilingual families. Starting today, you&ll be able to set up two languages in the Google Home app and the Assistant on your phone and Google Home will then happily react to your commands in both English and Spanish, for example.

Todayannouncement doesn&t exactly come as a surprise, given that Google announced at its I/O developer conference earlier this year that it was working on this feature. Itnice to see that this year, Google is rolling out its I/O announcements well before next yearevent. That hasn&t always been the case in the past.

Currently, the Assistant is only bilingual and it still has a few languages to learn. But for the time being, you&ll be able to set up any language pair that includes English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. More pairs are coming in the future and Google also says it is working on trilingual support, too.

Google tells me this feature will work with all Assistant surfaces that support the languages you have selected. Thatbasically all phones and smart speakers with the Assistant, but not the new smart displays, as they only support English right now.

While this may sound like an easy feature to implement, Google notes this was a multi-year effort. To build a system like this, you have to be able to identify multiple languages, understand them and then make sure you present the right experience to the user. And you have to do all of this within a few seconds.

Google says its language identification model (LangID) can now distinguish between 2,000 language pairs. With that in place, the companyresearchers then had to build a system that could turn spoken queries into actionable results in all supported languages. &When the user stops speaking, the model has not only determined what language was being spoken, but also what was said,& GoogleVP Johan Schalkwyk and Google Speech engineer Lopez Moreno write in todayannouncement. &Of course, this process requires a sophisticated architecture that comes with an increased processing cost and the possibility of introducing unnecessary latency.&

If you are in Germany, France or the U.K., you&ll now also be able to use the bilingual assistant on a Google Home Max. That high-end version of the Google Home family is going on sale in those countries today.

In addition, Google also today announced that a number of new devices will soon support the Assistant, including the tado° thermostats, a number of new security and smart home hubs (though not, of course, Amazonown Ring Alarm), smart bulbs and appliances, including theiRobot Roomba 980, 896 and 676 vacuums. Who wants to have to push a button on a vacuum, after all.