A personal assistant in your phone that knows what you want when you want it? Joe Svetlik tries Google Now What is it? Google Now is a digital assistant that knows what you're up to. Whereas with Apple's Siri you have to ask for information, Now checks your calendar, emails, search history and current location to provide you with info that might come in useful. So pencil in a meeting, and it'll tell you when to leave to beat the traffic. Not only that, it becomes more accurate the more you use it. Think of it as an artificial intelligence (AI) that's trying to help you throughout the day. How does it work? It's integrated into Google search, so there isn't actually a separate app called Google Now that you need to open. To use Now, you'll need a phone running the Jelly Bean version of Android; to open it, just swipe up from the bottom of the screen. You'll see a series of cards with info relevant to your situation. The cards are sparse but easily readable, and you can just swipe them away if they're of no interest. It's simple and intuitive. Is it really helpful? Generally, it works very well. It estimated a 24-minute journey to a lunch meeting, and was pretty spot on. Similarly, we Googled 'QPR (Queens Park Rangers), and then the next time we opened Now it told us they had a game the next day. One click of the card brought up past results and links to the official QPR homepage. There are some quirks, though. The cards don't update live (like Windows Phone 8's live tiles), so for directions to a meeting, you'll have to click the relevant one to open Google Maps. It's not a huge pain, but adds a stage to the process. Handily, once the meeting was over a card told us how long it'd take to get home. But then when we got home it tried to send us back to the meeting again, two hours after it'd finished. It's a minor gripe, but annoying nonetheless. Now is also supposed to provide train times when you approach when a station, but during our tests we were near London's Paddington, Euston and King's Cross, and didn't see any alerts. Despite numerous cinema searches, we also didn't see any screening times pop up when we were passing. And while it covers flight times, concerts, stock prices and more, it doesn't yet cover your media like albums and books. It'd be great to see an alert when your most-played artist is appearing in a show near you, for example. But having said this, just minutes after receiving an email invite to an event, we were provided with a map to find our way there, with estimated journey times, without having to lift a finger. This is pretty impressive. Is it worth upgrading? Google Now is part of Android Jelly Bean, which is only on a handful of handsets at the moment. It feels like the first step rather than a polished final product, and the novelty will soon wear off unless you're travelling a lot or constantly out doing new things. So it's probably not worth getting a whole new contract purely to use it. That said, as it's free, we highly advise you to take Google Now for a spin if you've got a new handset with the Android Operating System. It's the kind of software that, with a few updates, could really start to make life easier. While Apple's Siri acts like a personal assistant who'll do their best to help, Google Now is more like a butler who knows what you need, even before you do. JOE SVETLIK is a freelance tech news journalist -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.accessindia.org.in/pipermail/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in/attachments/20130504/4e8379d4/attachment.html> Search for previous postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/mobile.accessindia@accessindia.org.in _______________________________________________ Mobile.accessindia mailing list Mobile.accessindia@accessindia.org.in http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in to post send mail to: mobile.accessindia@accessindia.org.in
