The concept of a personalized voice assistant for Smartphones/tablets was initially hinted by Eric Schmidt few years ago (before Siri). The concept pointed towards taking information based on your behavior and habits, and giving you info regarding the info collected from you. With the launch of Google Now on Android 4.1, the search giant has finally shaped up its dream into reality.
Even though we’re still waiting for a hands-on review of what Google Now in detail can do, during the Keynote Google’s team demonstrated some of it’s feature. The main feature was safe route navigation, let’s say if you leave your house, and there’s a lot of traffic on the route you’re taking, Google Now can prepare an alternate route for you and notify you about it, so you can leave for work depending upon the conditions or take an alternative route.
That’s where the fun begins, not only it can inform you regarding what’s happening on the roads, it can also tell you what trains are coming next at the subway, it can find you good places to eat, and if you are in the restaurant, it can show you the best dishes you can have there, and so on.
Google Now can also be used with voice commands, much like Apple’s Siri, although the replies seem faster, and it will have more details in a personalized way. However, there are some people that might not like to share their daily experiences or their personal info to such AI’s. Well, if you don’t want to help Google in giving you more personalized results, you can always disable this voice assistant and it will not invade your privacy.
This is just the beginning from Google’s end towards personalized assistant front, unlike Apple, it’s expected from Google to add more enhancements with time.
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