Visual Translate / Camera mode in Google Translate

Google is a data-driven company. Analyzing the requests made to Google Goggles it became clear to me that the most popular category of visual search queries, is foreign language text. I approached the Google Translate team, and this product launch was a result of fruitful collaboration.

Together, we've conducted user studies, and developed an innovative UI in order to allow the user to specify what they want translated, and for displaying the results in a manner that makes sense to them.

This product launch resulted in a hockey stick growth of the feature, and contributed to the popularity of the Google Translate app.

Now people all over the world can undersdand signs and menus in languages they can not even type.

Google Photos Search

Helping users find photos of people, places, and things in an immensity of their photo collection is no small task.

Consider this simple query: "me in a hat". In order to fulfill it, a system needs to know what a hat is, and have an ability to recognize it in a photo. It also has to be able to recognize all the people in my photo collection, and determine which one of those is myself. Finally it needs to index all that in an efficient manner and make available for an immediate retrieval.

Our team was the first one ever to apply the Google Brain technology, now known as TensorFlow to the problem of image recornition, demonstraing the superiority of the Deep Neural Nets that are so popular today.

Hundreds of millions of people use this product all over the world.

Smart Camera / Gallery (Google Assistant on Android)

In a close collaboration with the Android team we have given the eyes to the Google Assistant.

Using the technology from Google Goggles we are able to respond to voice queries such as "What is this?" or "How much does this cost?"

This project gave rise to the Google Photos application.

Google Goggles

Google Goggles was a revolutionary application. Internally called "Visual Search", it strived to answer every possible visual query.

We do not often encounter unfamiliar things, that we can not describe with words, in the world around us. When we do, however, there is no better way to describe them, than to take a picture.

Incorporating truly revolutionaly machine vision technology stack behind the scenes, it was the first ever application to solve image recognition problem at scale.

It provided technology stack for many future products of Google, from Google Glass to Google Translate, to Google Seach by Image, and Google Photos.

Transit Directions on Google Maps in Russia

As a product manager, responsible for quality of Google Products and services in Russia, I led several launches, the most significant of which was Google Transit Directions.

Launching a product in a new country is not as simple, as translating all the strings into a foreign language, althought that is a part of it. Local knowledge is necessary. Local data needs to be collected. Local laws need to be obeyed. Local peculiarities need to be take care of.

For example, in Russia many transit routes overlap, and they don't follow any particular schedule. The Google Engineering team in Zurich, where all public transit runs precisely on schedule, had to modify their system in order to allow user instructions to be displayed in the following form: "Take bus number 5 or tram number 7, whichever comes first".

Chrome Developer Tools

If you are viewing this page in Google Chrome, you can hit CMD+Option+C on the Mac, or Ctrl+Shift+C on other platforms, in order to examine this page in detail, debug its Javascript, play with its CSS.

Chrome Developer Tools was built into Chrome from the very beginning, in order to help developers build a better web.

During this project I got a chance to work with, and learn from Lars Bak, a co-author of Java programming language and inventor of the V8 Javascript Engine, Sundar Pichai, who was a lead PM on the Chrome project at the time, and Brian Rakowski, perhaps the most well-known Google product manager.