Google Now has officially landed on the iOS platform. Today (04-29-13), Google released its advanced predictive personal assistant to rival its major competitor Siri. The search feature was already found in Google’s existing Search app, but the “Now” features, such as directions, weather and sports will be added onto the home screen.
Apple was the first to start off the personal assistant era. At the time nothing came even close to Siri or had the same knowledge. Many big manufactures such as Samsung tried to create an alternative to Siri with their S-Voice, first shown on the Galaxy S III. Unfortunately for Samsung, S-Voice was slow and had a hard time understanding human translation. To make matters worse Google was just now pushing out its own, much better, fast, personal assistant to Ice Cream Sandwich phones.
“Google Now is about giving you just the right information at just the right time,” said Google in its blog post. It takes seconds to get quick and accurate information whether it be the day’s weather, traffic, directions, translation or even updates on your flight. Everything is right on its home screen on cards.
After your installation of the app, from the App Store, is complete, Google will show you a quick and easy tutorial about the entire app itself. The more info you give to Google the better your results will be, as it can use GPS, Facebook, and your Google account. One small note to take in is that you will need to be running on iOS 5 or higher to install Google Now.
I have gotten the privilege to use both Siri and Google Now and can easily say that I much rather use Google Now. The voice playback is not robotic, and the results are clean. If personal assistant can’t find the answer it simply does a Google search for you. Oh, and let’s not forget how amazingly accurate it understands us Humans.
