Is Google Now a useful utility for others? I recently activated it when I purchased a new phone and am having a hard time understanding how to use it. It's showing estimates for how long it will take me to get home or to work but they are always based on locations where I was a while ago and often outright ridiculous, e.g. 2 hours 30 mins to go from Alcatraz to my home, by bicycle? The other "cards" seem to show up randomly, like the stock quotes that are always up top when I want to see the weather and hidden when I want to see stock quotes. How do others make use of Google Now?
edit for clarification: I have set it up to prefer cycling, but Alcatraz is an island.
Google Now isn't perfect and does require a bit of tweaking. Assuming you're on Android, I'd try tapping on the three dot icon on cards to make sure they're set right (for instance, changing it so that Google knows you prefer driving to bicycling.) Also be sure to try the "wand" icon at the bottom for overall settings.
To make sure Google Now is up to date you can pull to refresh. For me it's never more than 20-30 minutes out of date.
Thanks for the hints. Seems like my Google Now works as expected then, but my lifestyle isn't (yet) supported...
The fact that it recommends I bicycle from Alcatraz is after informing it (through the icon with the three dots) I usually cycle, so that works right, sort of. My commute is bicycle+train, which unfortunately is not a combination of travel modes supported by Google Maps.
For it to be really useful, you have to let Google know a bit more about yourself: you have to enable Search History and Location History. I think there's a separate option for access to your Gmail, too. Assuming you enable all this, you can get things like reminders for flights and shipments, it can remind you of topics you were searching for earlier, offer driving directions for places you've previously searched, movie times for movie trailers you've watched on Youtube, suggestions for nearby restaurants you might be interested in, etc.
I find it useful, but I'm completely in the Google ecosystem and don't have a problem with Google exposing all the data it knows about me.
Yes, you nailed it. The flight notifications and shipment logistics are the most useful things for me so far. It's great it you have FedEx or UPS deliveries a lot, and if you travel a lot.
And you're right that you have to be comfortable with exposing a lot of data. If you have all those things you mentioned turned off, the utility of it decreases.
One problem with flight notifications: If family/friends forward you their flight itineraries just to keep you in the loop, Google Now reminds you of their flights as well. It simply scrapes for the flight data; it doesn't check the email to see if its your flight.
Not really. Last week my dad came to visit me and forwarded the airline's email with the time of the flight. Google Now correctly stated the time I should leave to catch him at the airport. Seems to work fine for me on this issue.
In my experience it's only moderately helpful, and often plain useless, for exactly the reason you mention. It does not handle 'mixed modes' (or whatever you want to call it) at all. I have two places of work and sometimes work from home, but i can only set one location as work. I commute sometimes by bike or walking, sometimes by train, and rarely by car (but it does happen). But; according to Google you can only have one mode of transport. There's probably a pattern to my madness but it does not seem like Google is smart enough to find out (which is hard to believe). For now this is aimed at the american suburbanite soccer mom i guess (and as a, albeit european, semi-suburban dad i'm not even that far from that demographic).
As for the "where I was a while ago" - yes it does not track your position in real time. You have to refresh it manually to get the estimate from current position.
It's been really frustrating, because it sometimes tells you what you want, but not always, and it's often pretty stupid.
"Oh, you're three minutes from home at the local starbucks that you go to every day? Here's the navigation card so you know how to get home."
"Oh, it's 2am, after a concert venue you've been to once, 50 miles from home? No navigation card for you. Instead enjoy this story about a basketball game that ended seven hours ago."
When it pops up the right card at the right moment it's awesome, but then you're frustrated when it doesn't, and there's no clear way to convince it to learn the right thing.
On top of that is Google's habit of making things that assume your mobile connection is 100% reliable and always available.
"Oh, you temporarily do not have a connection because T-Mobile's coverage is horrendous? This sounds like a great time to wipe all cards you had up and attempt to download them again."
"No, I can't let you set reminders because you're not connected to the internet."
As for you, it didn't handle my locations at all. It picked up my home and work locations. Great. Except it kept showing me bus and train times after the bus or train in question had left. It kept showing me sports results - I'd rather read the phone book. It pretty much never showed me the information I'd like to see, and made it far harder to find the information I needed then and there vs. just bringing up the apps and bookmarks I already have.
Their voice recognition still has a <20% recognition rate for my accent (English w/Scandinavian accent), and that definitively does not make it any more useful.
And this is my problem with Google Now. The concept isn't useful to me. Just because I googled a sports team once doesn't mean I constantly want updates about that team. Just because I looked up a company's stock one day doesn't mean I want to know what the stock is doing every day. Google Now doesn't seem to understand that.
Granted, the flight updates are a really cool feature. But the service as a whole is too noisy to be generally useful.
I don't find it that useful or intuitive. It does keep me up to date on the weather where I am, but I can look out a window or use any of a bunch of widgets for real time/location weather. The destination service is always telling me how far work or home is away (regardless of my calendar) depending which one I am further from. The stocks doesn't seem to follow what I'm interested in too closely despite using Google Finance on the desktop. I do like when it has brought up flight details but this is not consistent enough to rely on. Currently it seems best for suggesting articles to read as it knows if I've been googling a topic or product.
Overall I'll keep adding my information manually and allowing passive collection. I have seen it improve quite a bit from it's earliest iteration . Getting Now working well will take some time. It has great potential utility if they nail it.
Everything it displays (which is not much) is most of the time ever irrelevant or redundant. I think the outside temperature is the only information I find useful.
I find it fantastic, but I travel a reasonable amount.
The other day I was waiting for a plane, and Now notified me the flight was cancelled nearly 10 minutes before the staff at the gate knew.
I just forward all my itineraries to my personal GMail account, and then Now tells me where my hotel is, what time check-in opens and it finds me restaurants nearby.
I am rather disappointed with Google Now. I recently took a flight, and it wasn't picked up at all, despite all the related emails in Gmail. I couldn't find a way to manually add a flight either.
The top card is always my employers stock quotes. I don't actually care how it moved during the day.
It shows the weather where I am, but I already had a home screen widget for that.
It shows directions to places I have been before, but I can never rely on a card to be there, so I rather open Maps directly.
For future reference to add just about anything manually to your google now, you can google search them from any synced chrome. When I'm planning a trip I do it on my desktop and it automatically appears on my phone.
The one time where it really blew my mind is when it told me about updates to blogs I visit. I'd visit a blog on my desktop, then when I was checking my phone, it let me know there was an update. It was cool but at the same time a bit bothersome that Google was recording my sites.
It's definitely on the unstable branches. Hecka annoying because it's almost impossible to close Chrome right now without killing the entire process tree.
As far as I know, I've only had Google Now in my Dev Channel Chrome for some months. Has it really already arrived in the Stable Channel? And in that case, wouldn't that have required the version numbers of all the channels to be bumped up (the Dev channel have been v35 since late February)? As far as I know features don't make it down the channels (Dev -> Beta -> Stable) individually (e.g. by being "cherry-picked") - they instead stay within the version where they where first added.
Apparently they must be rolling this feature out differently than other features which trickle down the channels. Maybe Google Now have been in the channels for a while without anybody knowing, just disabled unless some flag was enabled by either the client or a server. This way they can enable it for only certain users, circumventing the normal Channel release cycle.
I found this interesting quote in a 2014/02/03 blog post[1] on the Google Chrome blog:
"Update 3/24/2014: Starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks, Google Now users in all languages will be able to get these notifications in all channels of Chrome. To enable this feature, simply sign in to Chrome with the same Google Account you’re using for Google Now on Android or iOS."
This also suggest that they are using a different release approach than just relying on the release-channels.
I've had to disable Google Now in Chrome on my machines.
I check the Chicago weather where my parents live, once. Now I get constant notifications about the current weather in Chicago.
I looked up a sporting event score for a friend and now Google thinks I need to know the status of every game for a team I don't follow.
I couldn't find any way to tell Now that I didn't want those specific notifications and the only way to disable it was to turn it off completely via chrome://flags
I had the same annoying outcome as well. You can turn off just notifications from Google Now by clicking on the bell icon in your menubar (if you're on a Mac - do the equivalent on Windows/Linux) then clicking on the settings (gear icon) and then in there you can untick Google Now
I had the same problem - I was able to fix it by going to about:flags and disabling 'enable experimental ui for notifications'. This prevents chrome from using the native osx notification center, and instead uses a bell icon in the menubar. It also fixed the weather notifications issue for me.
I haven't used Microsoft Cortana, so I'm not sure if it's any good, but they reportedly get one thing Google completely misses: people want a personal assistant, not a creepy stalker. A personal assistant takes care of the kinds of tasks you tell him or her to handle; a stalker does things he or she thinks you want. Big difference. My personal assistant would schedule meetings at work. My stalker would send my mistress flowers for her birthday.
Well, I don't know how Google Now works but I presume there is a machine learning component in there and it should get better as you have lot more data to train the model. So, may be its early to dismiss such a product very soon.
It's not all that useful if you don't have iOS or Android. They need a way to track your location + I think they scan your mail locally on the device instead of on the server (and they can't do this on desktop).
Yeah, I'm mostly just complaining about their holy war against WP, I was kinda looking forward to trying out Google Now for myself, so it was something of a let down to learn Google still had a personal vendetta against me :P
On top of that, having services with an understanding of a four year old child push things into my information stream is really rather annoying. If I want to know I'll ask. Otherwise someone mature around me, who knows me well, will tell me, and will not be tempted to be sharing all they know about me with someone else at the drop of an invisible court order.
I'm also uncomfortable with the way Google collects so much user data. I wouldn't go so far as saying it's creepy though - they don't do anything sinister or nefarious with your data, but they do have an insatiable appetite to track and record as much of your online activity as they can.
They can track you across mobile, desktop and tablet devices. They have a desktop OS (ChromeOS) that potentially tracks everything you do online - whether you're running apps or browsing the web. You have to sign in to do anything - even to print to your desktop printer; all print jobs are routed through their cloud print service. Over the course of a few months or a year, Google will potentially know more about your online behaviour than you do.
Google's fingerprints reach into every corner of the web - you can't avoid them even if you're not signed in to a Google account. Google Analytics is everywhere as are the many Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). In fairness to Google, they do have an opt-out tool for Google Analytics. And many sites benefit from using Google's CDNs, although Google obviously benefits too).
What worries me is how easily Google avoids scrutiny on issues of user privacy and data collection, particuarly from the tech community who give them an easy ride on such matters.
I am at the point where I am pretty much convinced that it is beneficial for me to move off Google's services. Evenmore, because the speed of pushing unwanted products seems to increase rapidly. E.g. even if I have a paid Google Apps account, I cannot use Hangouts to its fullest without also using Google+, e.g., I cannot send pictures from my Android phone without Plus (which apparently creates a conversation-specific Plus album).
Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to find good paid replacements without sacrificing too much functionality (which is a testament to how good their products are). For instance:
- Fastmail: it's fast, has great webmail, but no ActiveSync for mobile devices. The calendar is still beta and there is no CardDAV syncing yet. Offers XMPP, but since nobody does federation anymore these days, it's not that useful anymore. No replacement for Google Docs.
- Exchange Online/Office 365: provides ActiveSync and EWS works well with Mail.app. Lync with Skype federation looks like it could be a replacement for Hangouts. Offers an online version of Office. However, my Android phone does not seem to work well with their servers, duplicating calendars, etc. Also, they miss features like sub-addressing, identities where you can relay mails via another SMTP server. And although they don't do ads, I am not sure how much they can be trusted.
I am most inclined towards using Fastmail.
Any other ideas/experiences of getting out of the Google infrastructure?
Yahoo and Hotmail could be substitutes for Gmail...I guess. Good luck.
Google Search has no reasonable alternatives.
Google Chrome can be replaced with Firefox. Do note that 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google.
YouTube has no viable alternatives. DailyMotion, Vimeo? Good luck finding what you searched for.
Google Maps' primary alternative is OpenStreetMap, but only as a repository for the maps themselves. Implementation like integration into smartphones is effectively nonexistent.
For Google Reader there's...oh wait.
Google Drive has alternatives, but not price-wise since the recent price drop. They're now shelling out 1TB of cloud storage for $10/month. Compare to Dropbox's 100GB.
Android has WinPhone and iOS as alternatives, but WinPhone isn't well-supported by third-party developers and iOS has almost zero flexibility.
G+ has Facebook as an alternative, but the crown for Most Evil is up for grabs.
Google Keep has Evernote or Simplenote.
Hangouts has Whatsapp, Skype, or any other chat app. Have fun trying to get your friends on the same one as you.
Google Docs has Microsoft Office Online, but I haven't used it and I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft is doing as much data-mining as possible on this platform.
For Google Wallet, you have Square Wallet, Apple's thing, and I couple of other services I've never heard of.
Google Voice has no alternatives, and it's about to be integrated into Hangouts somehow - you've been warned.
And Google Reader has...uh....
Google Calendar...good god. Good luck moving to another service with that one.
Google Translate's competitors aren't even in the same league.
There isn't even another service similar to Google Cloud Print.
And then there are Google Analytics, DoubleClick, AdWords, and whatever other kinds of super-secret proprietary data-mining magic that they use. Good luck avoiding those.
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." -Eric Schmidt
As deluded as it is, even honestly wishing for that betrays a smallness of character I find astonishing.
You know how in ancient times people who figured out how to predict an eclipse went on to play big boy with their oh so advanced, magic knowledge, and had that go to their head? We still live in those times.
I do many of these functions with just the usual Google voice commands. It's not as fancy, but making it into a separate app instead of making the features more accessible seems silly.
With the recent push (shove) of Google+ down everyone's throat, I find myself avoiding the use of Google services that collect & store too much personal data about me. I've tried Google Now but couldn't convince myself to stick to it. The negatives outweigh the benefits. Plus I love a tighter control on how my phone battery is drained. Google Now doesn't let me do that. I see an additional 20-30% drop per day with Stock Android & Google Now enabled. So long.
Privacy concerns. They accumulate a lot of personal data for customizing your experience & providing more contextual information. This problem has been compounded by Google using subtle trickery to get more out of you.
P.S. Android phones do not have a problem with battery life
I disabled Google Now on my Android phone; it was creeping me out. Government surveillance is bad, but for some reason Google collecting every bit of information about my life and constantly analyzing and using it (against me?) scares me much more than some bits collecting dust in an NSA data warehouse.
"Before you start using Google Now on your computer, you’ll need to set it up on iOS or Android first."
So you still need a Google Play or iOS device to get it. I can't set it up on my Kindle Fire, which does a fine job of running Android applications when they're made available outside Google Play.
Another "I had to disable it on my phone" here. I love to watch soccer and, once Google Now learns your favorite teams, it pushes those scores to you on your notifications tab by default. "Well, damn - I recorded that game so that I could watch it this afternoon. Thanks, Google, for ruining that for me."
Yes, I know now that you can disable notifications like that but I didn't realize it until after the 2nd or 3rd weekend this happened.
If you're going to make Chrome a dependency for an always on technology to stay in touch with your users, maybe invest some time stopping Chrome from costing half their battery life.
Google Now is broken. I get to work, and there is a "time to home" card, and vice-versa. It also thinks that I would like to go to work in the middle of the night on a weekend. It keeps showing me directions to places I've never been to or never searched for.
Or, I arrive somewhere and it immediately shows me a card for "time to home". Even though I have a calendar entry that has a location (so it knows I'm where I'm supposed to be) and it knows how long I'm supposed to be there.
There's also all sort of other idiocies. For instance I only got google now recently and then I traveled back to my home country for a couple of days. And what google now did was bombard me (hundreds literally) with cards for directions to every bloody address I've ever searched for in that country (months or even years ago). Wtf?
I really appreciate the complexity of a system like now, but as it is it would be better if they turned it off. It is broken.
I've been using it for years and I've either never had these problems or they haven't been so bad that I would consider it broken. Isn't a time to home card usually valuable?
It usually is. But in my case it's not as it shows up when I arrive somewhere. I mean, if they know I'm at work why would they show me that card immediately after I get there. It's not like they don't know when I usually go home.
I was an early fan of now on android but I think i'll be disabling this as it provides only useless notifications based on items tangentially related to things i've had a passing interest in and no longer provides up to date package tracking etc. Lately it has been giving me basketball scores because I read a machine learning article on predicting sports results despite having no interest in organized sports.
Additionally since it first came out I've started working from home in a rural area with decent but low density cell coverage that slows cellular assisted gps. This seems to convince it that I work at a cell tower giving totally meaningless travel time results to random hill tops.
I think this is an example of a tool that was only tested by and is really only useful for people in the young, urban, travel a lot demographic that most google employees are in. I know that google considers their culture sacred but they really need to diversify at least their least their test users it if they want to make products that the population as a whole benefits from.
This thing just started randomly popping up for me the last couple days without me asking. I've tried to disable it 2-3 times, but like a virus it just keeps coming back (http://i.imgur.com/24QTgaU.png). Incredibly annoying
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