UrTrix - UnRevealed Tricks

Wouldn’t it be great if you could check your emails on the phone and also enjoy YouTube videos in the background at the same time? Or, to save battery, you turn off the phone display and YouTube would still continue to stream the audio from the selected YouTube playlist in the background. Unfortunately, none of this is possible with the YouTube app on Android and iPhone. The app has to be active in the foreground and the phone display should be turned on else YouTube will immediately stop playback. The limitation holds true whether you are playing videos inside the YouTube app or using a web browser like Google Chrome or Firefox. Play YouTube in the Background on Android A few years ago, the Google Play Store listed a bunch of apps – uListen and SuperTube to name a few – that would let you use YouTube as a background music player but they’ve all been removed now. Also see: Most Useful Android Apps A bunch of open source options exist – MinTube and NewPipe  for example – tha...

You are at the check-in counter, there’s a long queue of people and the lady at the other end has just asked you to present a digital copy of some document for verification. You remember saving that file on your phone but don’t exactly remember where you placed it? Maybe the file is in your Gmail inbox, or Google Drive, or is it on the SD card? Locating files on your mobile phone isn’t always straightforward, especially when you are in a hurry, and this is exactly where Google Drive can help. Create File Shortcuts on Android Phone You can upload the file to Google Drive, then open the file inside the Drive app on your Android phone, and tap “Add to Home Screen” to create a shortcut to that file on the home screen. You should also check the “Available Offline” option so that the file shortcut works even when you are outside the coverage are. If you would like to place shortcuts to multiple documents on your home screen, it is recommended that you create a folder inside Google Drive...

With the Forms Email Notifications add-on, you can automatically send emails to anyone each time a user submits your Google Form . You can choose to notify the form owner, the form respondent, your team members or anyone else and the emails are triggered immediately after a form is submitted. The Google Forms add-on can also send conditional emails to specific people depending on what a user has selected in your Google Form. The body and subject of the email message can be personalized for each recipient with the form answers. Before we get into the implementation, here are some real-world examples where conditional email notifications can come handy: Example A: Send Email to Different Departments This is a tech support form where the customer fills in the product name and their location. With the Google Forms addon, you can create a conditional email that goes out to the iPhone support team when the selected answer is either iPhone or iPad. Another email could go out to the ...

One of the most useful features of Evernote and OneNote is Image OCR.  When you clip an image – be it a screenshot, a scanned business card, or a picture of the whiteboard – these tools automatically detect the text inside the image and make the image searchable. Gmail Gets OCR to Search for Text Within Images Gmail text search  has always been very capable but some might not know that Gmail, like Evernote, also performs OCR on images contained in email messages. When you perform searches inside Gmail or Google Inbox, the results always contain matching images that contain the search keywords. I tried Gmail OCR search against different types of images and the results were fairly good. Text recognition in Gmail works for both image attachments as well as inline embedded images. Gmail could successfully find matching text inside product manuals with small fonts, scanned book cover and a handwritten note but failed with logos and some street signs. Scanned Picture (Pass...

Introducing the all-new Voice Dictation v2.0, a speech recognition app that lets you type with your voice. There’s no software to install, there’s no training required and all you need is Google Chrome on your Windows PC, Mac OS or Linux. Dictation can recognize spoken words in English, Hindi, Español, Italiano, Deutsch, Français, and all the other popular languages . Another unique feature of Dictation is support for voice commands that let you do more with your voice. For instance, you can say a command like new line or nueva línea for inserting lines. You can add punctuations, special symbols and even smileys using simple commands in most languages. This YouTube video will walk you through the Dictation app. Open Dictation How to use Dictation for Speech Recognition Dictation stores everything in your browser locally and not a byte of your data is uploaded anywhere.  Speech recognition will be more accurate in a quiet environment and the built-in microphone...

Audio hosting websites like SoundCloud or Anchor.fm make it easy for you to embed audio files in your web pages and blogs. Just upload your file – like an MP3 song or an audio podcast – to any of these sites and they’ll provide the HTML embed code that you can copy-paste in your web template. Simple! If you have been storing your MP3 files inside Google Drive, you can embed the files directly from Drive without having to upload them to another website. The Drive MP3 player can be embedded on any website that supports IFRAME and the list includes Blogger, WordPress, Medium or even the new Google Sites. Also see: Embed YouTube as Audio Player Step 1: Upload the MP3 to Google Drive Open drive.google.com and upload the MP3 to your Google Drive. After the file is uploaded, right-click to share and set the sharing permission to “Anyone on the Internet can find and view”. Step 2: Generate the Player Embed Code The Google Drive URL will have the following structure: http://ift.tt/2lGfg...

Audio can bring your presentations to life especially in a kiosk setting where slideshows play unattended in a continuous loop. If you have recently made the switch from Microsoft PowerPoint or Keynote to Google Slides, the one important feature that you might be missing inside Google Slides is audio. Both Keynote and PowerPoint make it extremely easy for you to add audio to a presentation. You can embed MP3 music files that play in the background for the entire presentation or you can record your own voiceover narration that is synchronized with the timing of each slide. How to Add Audio to Google Slides Google Slides do not support audio files but you do have the option to embed videos inside the individual slides. The workaround, therefore, is simple – place the video file on a slide, make it invisible and turn on the auto-play mode. Demo: Google Slides with Audio Step 1: Prepare the Audio File You can use free tools like FFmpeg or Audacity to convert your audio files into v...