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 For me it's never more than 20-30 minutes out of date.
you can also occasionally correct Google now via the non-obvious settings icon in the card, but i'm hoping they'll allow for more explicit settings in future. it's technically impressive that they can reasonably intuit locations and so on, but i'd be happy to make it easy for them by setting it myself.
I wish Google Now was that good for me. I've used the same commute since starting to use Google Now months ago, but it keeps telling me to use an alternate route that takes the same time, but has tolls, busier roads and a higher probability of delays. I can't seem to get it to figure out that I won't go that way.
While I can use Google Now on my Galaxy S III, apparently Google doesn't want me using it if I won't do things their way.
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.
You're right, i did confuse Google Now and Google+, d'oh! :(
I don't get Google Now, though. It's rather slow and i still haven't seen much something that helps me on a day-to-day base. I don't know if other countries see different offers, but it basically shows me the weather (wow, have that already) and how long i may take home (or not, because it get's it wrong).
And for pure searching it just starts too slow, imo (using a Galaxy Nexus here).
I can see that it is a little bit faster now then a few months ago and there are many more cards in the preferences.. but it still only shows me weather and driving time. The Google Voice recognition works surprisingly well nowadays..
Has anybody else tried it on iPhone? Mine only shows a wether card, and a map card showing me the way home now; nothing more. I even tried creating event in my calendar (both Google and iOS calendars) but no card is added. Is there a significant sync delay for Google Now to retrieve information?
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.
Hmm.. Those settings on the cards seem (so far, as far as I can tell, insert disclaimer about being new to the tablet and all) only affect the parameters of this _type_ of card. So I can say when ('before commute' and other opaque event like names) a card should show up, how important the content is .. but I haven't found any setting in Google Now that actually allows me to change the content (remove that listed location, add a different one, change my home address..), the data itself.
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.
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.
I've turned most of these off. The weather is useful as is commute information, but site updates and things Google think I might like based on my searches are generally poor. There was a recent reminder not to forget to vote and occasional "are you interested in such-and-such an popular event" cards, but these never seem to have an option to prevent recurrences.
Parking information would be useful if it were both accurate (it isn't, due to taking a park and ride bus) and consistent. Like many Google Now cards it seems difficult to predict whether it will turn up or not.
Another trick it used to do was show me cards with navigation information to somewhere I'd searched for, usually the night before a trip. But, when I got into my car at 6am the next day such information was nowhere to be seen and I'd have to search for it again. Now I save the location in the calendar so at least there's a link to click, causing Google Now to remind me to leave on time after I've already left, sometimes when I'm nearly there.
Overall, it's not a useful product and relies upon data being collected which I'd rather wasn't. The only reason I leave it on is so that I can dictate reminders to my watch, which I find a very useful feature. The requirement to use Google Now for this last feature seems rather arbitrary to me.
This is definitely a big issue with Google Now. It's not that it's unpredictable though, at least in my opinion. It's that it's unpredictable combined with no way to deal with the consequences of that.
It does what it thinks it should, and you have no knobs to turn. If it fails, it just fails. The first year of Google Now, it would often do exactly that. It popped up the card that it claims will appear at the end of the month with information about how far you've walked or biked maybe twice? The rest of the time, it just didn't appear, and there's no way to call it up manually.
I noticed in KitKat that it now offers to let you tell it whether you typically walk, bike, drive, etc. to particular destinations. It seems like in a number of areas, they've chosen to add some manual control to the automated process. I think that's going to be good enough. I'm fine with software that tries to intelligently guess my needs as long as it provides me with a way to override incorrect guesses.
The user experience with Google Now varies heavily depending on your usage habits and the type of phone you have. The only thing Google Now showed me for months were outdated, inaccurate weather 'forecasts' that made absolutely no sense (and opening it took more than 30 seconds on my old Nexus S). Boy, was I disappointed.
But if you set your Settings to the right items, you enable all your Search History, and everything else, and you have a modern phone like a Nexus 4, Google Now is amazing. Really, really amazing. It's definitely there and it works fantastically well, if you care to set it up right.
Google Now has been pretty useless for me. Its mostly an annoyance, I'm always having to dismiss its place suggestions and "Time to home/work" notifications.
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.
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