Google Now is very good in San Francisco: Now predicts general-interest items such as news and weather, and also immediate-vicinity items such as metro train schedules as I walk by the metro station, and movie schedules as I walk by a theater.
The Now cards link to more information, which makes it easy to explore more. In my experience, the cards are near-100% accurate.
I use it in Phoenix, Arizona and think it's one of Google's best products. It's not something you have to actively check to get the benefits and the cards it delivers are usually relevant and useful (like weather, travel times to appointments and location based information cards). IMO, you're (likely) already giving Google so much personal information, Now is their way of making something useful of it for you.
I feel like I'm using it constantly. I even find myself creating appointments more often for what I know is coming up just so I can get those departure reminders. I've uninstalled the Flixter app because it seems to show me movie recommendations every time I'm about to lookup showtimes. I almost never open a package tracking or travel reservation email any more. It just seems to save me time.
I use it a lot. It pushes down alerts when my subway lines are delayed, as well as the status of various deliveries I have from Amazon.com and the like. Also sports results, which I sometimes care about.
That said, I believe what the article says - I don't feel like Google Now has changed meaningfully in a long time. The other day I got an alert saying that app-specific cards are being enabled, but I'm yet to see one.
It seems nice to me, but doesn't fit my lifestyle at all.
I don't keep appointments, I never book planes or hotels, I don't drive anywhere that I need directions, I don't follow sports teams, I don't order enough stuff online to care about tracking them, so on and so on.
London-ish based, regularly pootle around the UK. Very useful. Massively plugged in to Google services though, so suspect it knows everything it could need to to be useful.
I think in some form it's "the future". I'm not sure they've found the best way to expose it yet but the underlying functionality can be pretty amazing and useful.
Day to day, I get all my weather (current location and upcoming locations based on travel itinerary), my financial interests' status (based on google finance portfolio), traffic (based on calendar event locations).
Occasionally, it really saves my bacon. I was about to head over to JFK in a few hours to board a flight to the west coast when Washington DC suddenly became a massive no-fly zone and dozens of flights got cancelled on the spot[0]. I had no idea, and probably wouldn't have known until I got to the airport a few hours later and reached the gate. Except—Google Now alerted me that my flight was cancelled the moment it happened (even before news broke about what caused it). Immediately we hopped on the phone and got another flight booked, before the airline itself even started rebooking flights. In fact, the airline never even bothered to alert us that the flight was cancelled.
Similar situations have happened with traffic through construction, presumably pulled from Waze alerts ("hey your next appointment is at X, and normally it would take 25min to get there but today it'll take 40min because this freeway is completely closed").
Google Now is basically a collection of a dozen services that I rather not bother manage independently, all without any interaction or signup. Yes, it "reads my email" and my calendar and the queries I make through it.
Another fun example: I was researching which phone I wanted to buy next, so I was googling a bunch of phones that haven't been released yet. Few weeks later, it pops up on Google Now "hey, you searched for this and there's news about it today."
Lots of cute little surprises when you travel, too. Entering a new country? It'll show you the local currency exchange and the timezone difference (and nearby attractions that I often ignore).
Anyways, it's a great integrated experience and just keeps getting better over time.
I also use it a lot and find it very useful. Most of the time it's spot on, however one time I was searching for a compiler error code at work and the next day Now had started tracking flight information for some flight that happened to have the same flight code as the compiler error. :)
Ha, that is funny. Yea, I was researching flights that day (to find alternate routes from NYC to SFO) and by the end of the day I had like 5 flight alert cards on my Google Now. They're easy enough to swipe away, but it is amusing in a mildly-embarrassing kind of way.
Although in your world that might feel like an app that everyone would use ... most of us go to a job in the same city in the same location day after day.
The problem may be that those apps are actually aimed at such a small portion of the earth's population (read: frequent business travelers) that maybe it is not sustainable.
The traffic alerts, weather, game scores, and appointment reminder are pretty nice, even if you don't travel. The events near by could be useful too. It is very convenient if you have an android phone, but I doubt I would miss it much if it wasn't there.
Despite driving the same exact route every day, it has saved my bacon when it snows, routing me around accidents. Same for construction, it answers the question "is the construction zone going to make me 2 minutes or 15 minutes behind my usual schedule?"
I don't use it every day though, so I do wish it was one easy tap away from the lock screen if I see an unexpected slowdown (that's about as far as I can manage without actively looking at my phone).
I used it a lot when I carried an Android phone. It was useful for summarizing important emails, delivery notifications, reminders to leave for appointments, and things like that. The deep OS integration and Android's notification system made it possible.
On iOS, I almost never use it. Its value-add is not strong enough without the OS-level integration. The only thing I'll open it for on iOS is flight status updates, but Inbox provides that value too now.
I use it fairly often. Using Google for everything it's started to pick up my habits.
It'll show me when webcomics I regularly visit are updated (although that's a 0% on the useful scale since I either have them registered in feedly or in a bookmark folder categorized by their update schedule).
What's really nice though for me is recommended stories. It surfaces content I wouldn't see otherwise. I get a little bit of use out of that.
Primarily though, I haven't found a lot of use from it yet. I just recently got package tracking and it hasn't been incredibly useful yet, and I never check it for Weather like I should.
I guess it isn't quite useful yet. Would be more useful if Mint Bills plugged into it and kept me on my toes about upcoming bills, or the normal mint integration did.. anything.
Duolingo integration is interesting, but not entirely useful.
I use it so much that I barely feel like I'm using it. To me it's just part of my phone. I slide to the right, I see my agenda, my next flight or booking or last bus, the weather, news I'm interested in. It's a 5-second interaction most of the time. It doesn't need to be more. (I'm in the Netherlands)
The weather info is always useful, quickly comparing weather at the current location to home is nice.
Transport is often relevant (if only Google Maps was aware of our U-Bahn instead of suggesting a 3h journey involving 5 busses), and it's helpful that you are warned when the last train goes (before midnight).
The scanning of emails for information is clever. I was quite surprised that it managed to pick up local train tickets and reminded me on the day, and it helps keep track of packages ordered through various sites.
Nearby photos and "things to do" can be nice to see, and in some places it will offer you "information about this place" (only observed in the Netherlands).
Sometimes it also showed some interesting blogs.
Some things are entirely useless or annoying to me, like the "breaking news" articles of american tabloids, or translations of "good morning" to German while in a train in Germany (as if Google doesn't know I speak German).
Until this thread I believed that "Google Now" was that voice search interface with the irritating tendency to pop up and start listening to whatever is going on in the room at the slightest provocation.
Not a regular on re/code but is it a google-hostile territory? It looked like the author tried too hard to prove a point on Pichais' leadership, Now on Taps' future sooner than it is possible. And that drawing contrast to Bings' feature is uncanny too.
yeah, a terrible conclusion with slim data, isn't it? thats where opinion and propaganda (and downvoting) come into picture. and ggle is not my favorite company, even by long shot.
"We're going to put out a lot of new products, and cancel most of them leaving our users high and dry. This will inspire yet more developers to jump on board."
The transit alerts for NYC are pretty brain dead. I get alerts at lunch alerting me that my commute home has service disruptions on the subway. I'm not leaving for 6+ hours so the notifications are useless.
I visit my girlfriend and friends in predictable schedules, and I always like the gesture of it telling me how long it will take to get to each of them on those days and times.
Not sure what happened but it's showing less cards over time for me. I wonder if the back-end overhead is just too high to predict and deliver timely information to me.
On the note of all the comments bashing the usefulness of Google Now in the first place, I think it would be helpful is Google had some visuals on use, growth of use and genre of cards, and some survey feedback about it.
I like
1. stepping out of work after a 13 hour day and pulling up my phone and google telling me which way I need to drive home because there is a 20min delay due to an accident. It's not something I think about everyday to check, just like checking the weather at 6am in the morning. Sure if my life was perfect I would but it's not. Google does these simple tasks for me and turns bad days into better ones but not adding on another 45min on the way home when I have already had a long day.
2. airports/new city? I wake up in the morning google already knows if my flight has been rerouted, the potential for delay due to weather, and whatever airport or new city I'm in, it tells me where there is to eat and what to do. Sure there are plenty of additional apps I could download if I was in the "in crowd" in san fran and knew the best ones for each city, but I'm not, and usually I'm busy so I want to have 15 highly ranked restaurants give me the best selection.
If I'm there on vacation sure I'll put more effort into finding off the beaten path places but honestly google now is helpful for people distracted with their everyday life.
3. At one point I was with visiting my boyfriend while he was on a business trip in Flagstaff. Google obviously knows we are dating. My phone was dead but the reminder for my flight came up on his phone. Sure there is a separate "app" just for that, per airline and then I could share my flight with my bf but WHY? Google already knew where he was, knew I was most likely flying there to visit him and gave him updates on my schedule 24hrs before hand all the way until I got home safely, as well as myself. Easy, one less thing to worry about in 2 peoples busy working lives. Once I send him my flight info, google picked right up on it. No "extra" apps needed. Didn't have to think to remember to do this.
4. I use google keep notes like an OCD freak as well so its nice to have what I've decided it important to me as well as things that I'd like to check if I remembered but google already has it staring back at me on my screen when I wake up in the morning or walk into a crowded airport or think I'm having an normal ride home.
I also (and for most young kids in big cities) have a busy social life and go to lots of music shows, but I go to alot so I don't remember the time date and price of every one so it's just nice to have if I don't do the same thing everyday.
It makes driving home, navigating airports, remembering to wish your college roommate happy birthday on the way to your rerouted terminal and also knowing you have an extra 10minutes to go to jamba juice that you didn't know was around the corner so you don't have to live off airplane food.
These are things that make my day alot nicer, alot more functional. I don't know what all the fuss about google now is...
That being said, the implications on privacy and how this data is stored and shared is an entirely different story from how convenient it is, but I am commenting on its usefulness, which other people don't seem to agree with.
The interesting subtext to all this is that Android wasn't originally a Google project at all - Android was originally a project started by some ex-Danger workers. Google bought them out because they didn't want to be locked out of mobile search (and give them credit for prescience because the iPhone hadn't been announced yet).
Pichai didn't work on Android, or even search or AdWords or what have you. He worked on a browser toolbar before working on Chrome. Chrome seems to have constantly won internal battles at Google (look at how long Google resisted making Android tablets in favor of giving ChromeOS tablets time to develop), even as Chrome is probably the less successful of the two. It shouldn't be surprising that he lets search take over a project that started in Android.
Historically, given Google's flexibility in transferring from project to project, and the lack of promotion benefit in working on a project that has already 'shipped', a "staff exodus" isn't really indicative of anything other than the engineers were moving on to something new to add to their Google Resume.
I think the article was trying to couch this more as a "barbarians at the gate" piece with Microsoft in the role of the Huns, but that analogy falls pretty flat given the amount of innovation going on in both companies.
What I found really interesting is that Apple isn't really mentioned. Yesterday I got a push notification on my iPad about all the new things Siri could do. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that but I'm guessing the race is on to make the voice inputs more functional. That, for me at least, is a part that makes something like Google now useful or not. I've been developing a habit of adding reminders for things to do when I get into work and that helps keep things from dropping off the plate, prior to location based reminders it really wasn't frictionless enough for me. And the pre-processing of things like flight iteneraries has stuff like the flight confirmation code easily accessed.
The bottom line is I can see the path to a mobile device I talk to, and it talks back, much like an executive secretary, to keep the important bits in order so I can focus on other things. Is Cortana winning that battle? Siri? Google? Hard to say, but the battle is definitely engaged.
Can we stop talking about market competition as a battle where the only outcome is a single winner? That is almost never the result and almost never what you want as a customer/user/consumer.
Sure we can stop, although it is a competition. Its a competition for dollars, it has territory, it has strategies and tactics, and it generally is amenable to the same analysis you would use when analyzing armies attempting to capture, defend, or hold territory.
I called it a competition myself. My issue is only with the part where people look for an overall “winner”. It’s an evolutionary process, there is no winner. Your ending question will likely never have a meaningful answer.
But there are extinctions, which is kind of like losing. But more importantly there are technologies that become widespread (VHS) and those that never do (BetaMax) and understanding the successful technology as the area where additional investment is merited is often, if imprecisely, called the "winning" technology.
I can absolutely guarantee that my ending question will have a meaningful answer, either one or none of these systems will be the one that everyone uses, the other two will be the "niche" ones that hardly anybody uses (and I say this as a diehard Amiga fan boy). And as much as I might dislike the choice the market makes, I understand that once critical mass is achieved, it becomes economically unviable to continue investing in the "losing" technology.
I've tried Todoist, Wunderlist, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Google Keep, Apple Reminders and none of them coalesce into a nice simple personal task manager that keeps me happy.
I do have a Moto 360 and bark commands to that more often and I find that I keep going back to that to send me reminders. I believe it uses whatever is behind the reminders infrastructure in Google Inbox/Keep. Other than the fact that it sometimes has a hard time recognizing my voice it works well for the most part and I'm so busy that it is the simplest way for me to keep track of things in the moment.
Question - how many of you use google now's voice functionality, vs the inbuilt push notifications/card interfaces? A lot of comments here focus on the latter, but I'm surprised not many mentioned the former.
To me, siri/cortana are aiming to be the method of conversational interaction for your phone in the future whereas Now is trying to be the intelligent/interactive notifications platform.
It's only been in the most recent update to Google's mobile app that they started defaulting suggested voice queries into the search box. Before that, it's really challenging from a discoverability pov to figure out what exactly you can ask Google. And some things are just clumsy. Try asking it to call someone, for example, if you have multiple phone numbers for them.
I agree, and I'm very glad that Google Now is doing the latter. I have no desire to interact with my phone by voice and honestly, every time I've tried it I've been deeply underwhelmed. Maybe it's because I live in a city where no-one drives - I can see it being useful while driving.
Presenting cards/notifications about something before I ask for it will always be a superior interface to one that requires you to act, IMO.
I'm on a developer preview version of Android M, I just installed Bing Search, can't seem to get it to work. Perhaps there is a conflict? I enabled Bing in accesibility but when I long-press the circle button it still opens Google Now.
The original Google Now team leaving is not indicative of a problem. Google Now is more a search product than an Android product, so it makes sense for it to be taken over by Search engineers.
53 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI tried to use it while in the US. The information it pushed to me was right more than half of the time, useful about 5% of the time.
Here in Europe it's pretty useless. No cards or no relevant cards.
The Now cards link to more information, which makes it easy to explore more. In my experience, the cards are near-100% accurate.
That said, I believe what the article says - I don't feel like Google Now has changed meaningfully in a long time. The other day I got an alert saying that app-specific cards are being enabled, but I'm yet to see one.
I don't keep appointments, I never book planes or hotels, I don't drive anywhere that I need directions, I don't follow sports teams, I don't order enough stuff online to care about tracking them, so on and so on.
When I've travelling I live by it.
Day to day, I get all my weather (current location and upcoming locations based on travel itinerary), my financial interests' status (based on google finance portfolio), traffic (based on calendar event locations).
Occasionally, it really saves my bacon. I was about to head over to JFK in a few hours to board a flight to the west coast when Washington DC suddenly became a massive no-fly zone and dozens of flights got cancelled on the spot[0]. I had no idea, and probably wouldn't have known until I got to the airport a few hours later and reached the gate. Except—Google Now alerted me that my flight was cancelled the moment it happened (even before news broke about what caused it). Immediately we hopped on the phone and got another flight booked, before the airline itself even started rebooking flights. In fact, the airline never even bothered to alert us that the flight was cancelled.
Similar situations have happened with traffic through construction, presumably pulled from Waze alerts ("hey your next appointment is at X, and normally it would take 25min to get there but today it'll take 40min because this freeway is completely closed").
Google Now is basically a collection of a dozen services that I rather not bother manage independently, all without any interaction or signup. Yes, it "reads my email" and my calendar and the queries I make through it.
Another fun example: I was researching which phone I wanted to buy next, so I was googling a bunch of phones that haven't been released yet. Few weeks later, it pops up on Google Now "hey, you searched for this and there's news about it today."
Lots of cute little surprises when you travel, too. Entering a new country? It'll show you the local currency exchange and the timezone difference (and nearby attractions that I often ignore).
Anyways, it's a great integrated experience and just keeps getting better over time.
[0]. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/15/dc-new-york-...
The problem may be that those apps are actually aimed at such a small portion of the earth's population (read: frequent business travelers) that maybe it is not sustainable.
I don't use it every day though, so I do wish it was one easy tap away from the lock screen if I see an unexpected slowdown (that's about as far as I can manage without actively looking at my phone).
On iOS, I almost never use it. Its value-add is not strong enough without the OS-level integration. The only thing I'll open it for on iOS is flight status updates, but Inbox provides that value too now.
It'll show me when webcomics I regularly visit are updated (although that's a 0% on the useful scale since I either have them registered in feedly or in a bookmark folder categorized by their update schedule).
What's really nice though for me is recommended stories. It surfaces content I wouldn't see otherwise. I get a little bit of use out of that.
Primarily though, I haven't found a lot of use from it yet. I just recently got package tracking and it hasn't been incredibly useful yet, and I never check it for Weather like I should.
I guess it isn't quite useful yet. Would be more useful if Mint Bills plugged into it and kept me on my toes about upcoming bills, or the normal mint integration did.. anything.
Duolingo integration is interesting, but not entirely useful.
It makes me very self-conscious about my embarassing interests sometimes though.
The weather info is always useful, quickly comparing weather at the current location to home is nice.
Transport is often relevant (if only Google Maps was aware of our U-Bahn instead of suggesting a 3h journey involving 5 busses), and it's helpful that you are warned when the last train goes (before midnight).
The scanning of emails for information is clever. I was quite surprised that it managed to pick up local train tickets and reminded me on the day, and it helps keep track of packages ordered through various sites.
Nearby photos and "things to do" can be nice to see, and in some places it will offer you "information about this place" (only observed in the Netherlands).
Sometimes it also showed some interesting blogs.
Some things are entirely useless or annoying to me, like the "breaking news" articles of american tabloids, or translations of "good morning" to German while in a train in Germany (as if Google doesn't know I speak German).
I like
1. stepping out of work after a 13 hour day and pulling up my phone and google telling me which way I need to drive home because there is a 20min delay due to an accident. It's not something I think about everyday to check, just like checking the weather at 6am in the morning. Sure if my life was perfect I would but it's not. Google does these simple tasks for me and turns bad days into better ones but not adding on another 45min on the way home when I have already had a long day.
2. airports/new city? I wake up in the morning google already knows if my flight has been rerouted, the potential for delay due to weather, and whatever airport or new city I'm in, it tells me where there is to eat and what to do. Sure there are plenty of additional apps I could download if I was in the "in crowd" in san fran and knew the best ones for each city, but I'm not, and usually I'm busy so I want to have 15 highly ranked restaurants give me the best selection.
If I'm there on vacation sure I'll put more effort into finding off the beaten path places but honestly google now is helpful for people distracted with their everyday life.
3. At one point I was with visiting my boyfriend while he was on a business trip in Flagstaff. Google obviously knows we are dating. My phone was dead but the reminder for my flight came up on his phone. Sure there is a separate "app" just for that, per airline and then I could share my flight with my bf but WHY? Google already knew where he was, knew I was most likely flying there to visit him and gave him updates on my schedule 24hrs before hand all the way until I got home safely, as well as myself. Easy, one less thing to worry about in 2 peoples busy working lives. Once I send him my flight info, google picked right up on it. No "extra" apps needed. Didn't have to think to remember to do this.
4. I use google keep notes like an OCD freak as well so its nice to have what I've decided it important to me as well as things that I'd like to check if I remembered but google already has it staring back at me on my screen when I wake up in the morning or walk into a crowded airport or think I'm having an normal ride home.
I also (and for most young kids in big cities) have a busy social life and go to lots of music shows, but I go to alot so I don't remember the time date and price of every one so it's just nice to have if I don't do the same thing everyday.
It makes driving home, navigating airports, remembering to wish your college roommate happy birthday on the way to your rerouted terminal and also knowing you have an extra 10minutes to go to jamba juice that you didn't know was around the corner so you don't have to live off airplane food.
These are things that make my day alot nicer, alot more functional. I don't know what all the fuss about google now is...
That being said, the implications on privacy and how this data is stored and shared is an entirely different story from how convenient it is, but I am commenting on its usefulness, which other people don't seem to agree with.
Pichai didn't work on Android, or even search or AdWords or what have you. He worked on a browser toolbar before working on Chrome. Chrome seems to have constantly won internal battles at Google (look at how long Google resisted making Android tablets in favor of giving ChromeOS tablets time to develop), even as Chrome is probably the less successful of the two. It shouldn't be surprising that he lets search take over a project that started in Android.
Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board. I wonder how much credit goes to their prescience and how much of it goes to their inside knowledge of the facts.
I think the article was trying to couch this more as a "barbarians at the gate" piece with Microsoft in the role of the Huns, but that analogy falls pretty flat given the amount of innovation going on in both companies.
What I found really interesting is that Apple isn't really mentioned. Yesterday I got a push notification on my iPad about all the new things Siri could do. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that but I'm guessing the race is on to make the voice inputs more functional. That, for me at least, is a part that makes something like Google now useful or not. I've been developing a habit of adding reminders for things to do when I get into work and that helps keep things from dropping off the plate, prior to location based reminders it really wasn't frictionless enough for me. And the pre-processing of things like flight iteneraries has stuff like the flight confirmation code easily accessed.
The bottom line is I can see the path to a mobile device I talk to, and it talks back, much like an executive secretary, to keep the important bits in order so I can focus on other things. Is Cortana winning that battle? Siri? Google? Hard to say, but the battle is definitely engaged.
I can absolutely guarantee that my ending question will have a meaningful answer, either one or none of these systems will be the one that everyone uses, the other two will be the "niche" ones that hardly anybody uses (and I say this as a diehard Amiga fan boy). And as much as I might dislike the choice the market makes, I understand that once critical mass is achieved, it becomes economically unviable to continue investing in the "losing" technology.
I do have a Moto 360 and bark commands to that more often and I find that I keep going back to that to send me reminders. I believe it uses whatever is behind the reminders infrastructure in Google Inbox/Keep. Other than the fact that it sometimes has a hard time recognizing my voice it works well for the most part and I'm so busy that it is the simplest way for me to keep track of things in the moment.
To me, siri/cortana are aiming to be the method of conversational interaction for your phone in the future whereas Now is trying to be the intelligent/interactive notifications platform.
That seems like the fundamental difference.
Presenting cards/notifications about something before I ask for it will always be a superior interface to one that requires you to act, IMO.