Go to the profile of Ken Ryu
Ken Ryu
CEO & Founder. Gogocater.

Google Now Changes Everything

I am a little embarrased to admit I am just getting going with Google Now. Google Now went live on July 9, 2012.

POSITIONING AND MARKETING

Fair or not, I am going to pass some of the blame for my tardy adoption of this amazing technology to Google’s marketing and branding. Too often this product is described as “Siri, but better”. Although Siri has many fans, it didn’t personally grab me. Sure, there are use cases where a voice assistant is useful, but Siri has to guess a user’s intent and context on requests, and often guesses wrong. In contrast, Google Now can take advantage of contextual user information such as:

  • current location,
  • current weather,
  • scheduled events,
  • contacts,
  • news preferences,
  • sports team affiliations,
  • travel patterns, and
  • financial stock interests,

to better interpret a user’s request.

Don’t Speak, I Know What You’re Thinking

This is the hook that changes everything for me. Technology should interpret a user’s actions, preferences, patterns, and real-time situation to provide relevant information and services to empower, educate and delight the user while automating mundane tasks. Technology should work without making the user labor to capture value. Google Now delivers this promise.

No, I Don’t Want to Fill Out Your Form

I use Google products for most of my tasks and information including:

  • Gmail,
  • Google Calendar,
  • Google Finance, and
  • Google Maps.

Google Now stitches all these products together and puts it together under one common interface. Google Now shows me a few incoming emails (GMAIL), shows me my schedule for the day (GOOGLE CALENDAR), and provides me a list of stocks I am tracking (GOOGLE FINANCE). I only had to add my 4 sports teams I track, which took a max of 120 seconds, and that was it for setup! Google Now captures my profile information from searchs and app setups.

Real Time Stock Tracker — Pulled from Google Finance

A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW GOOGLE NOW WORKS

  1. MEETING ASSISTANT

You enter a meeting in Google calendar including the address of the meeting. Google Now knows that you are likely to travel by car. Google Now will give you a notification to remind you of the meeting with the approximate travel time by car. Click into the notification and start a driving direction navigation to your meeting location.

2. REAL-TIME SPORTS ALERTS

Once you let Google Now the teams you follow, Google Now will alert you if your team is playing and make it easy to check the score of the game.

3. DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR

Parking Location Finder

Once you stop for a while in a location that is not your home or work, Google Now recognizes you have likely parked. Google Now records the geolocation of your parking spot. Google Now assumes you might have forgotten where you parked. Opening Google Now, there is a Parking Location card which you can click to get directions to your car.

ONE APP TO RULE THEM ALL

For news, finance, sports and meetings, I no longer have to play the app switching game. I can go to Google Now and see all the relevant information in one simple user interface.

Google Now also has an API for non-Google 3rd Party Apps. https://developers.google.com/schemas/now/cards#a-hotel-reservation

Example of Google Now API Use Cases

As you can see from the screenshot, an airline app can feed Google Now your flight info, and Google Now can create a notification a few hours ahead of time that your flight is coming up and give you an option to get navigation to the airport. The app can also feed Google Now your boarding pass.

The user would still book the flight from Virgin’s website/app, or travel site/app (such as Expedia). Once the transaction is complete, Google Now takes over for the follow up.

INFORMATION AND NOTIFICATIONS AT THE RIGHT TIME

Google Now has a sense of time. Rather than clutter up your inbox with a flight that is a month out, Google Now can intelligently present notifications as the trip gets close. On the day of the flight, the boarding pass and navigation link to the airport can take a prominent position on the Google Now interface. Once the event passes, Google Now can remove the info.

WHY DIDN’T MY FRIENDS FORCE ME TO USE GOOGLE NOW?

My circle of friends and acquantainces are technophiles. We discuss merits and experiences for various technologies such as AppleWatch, Uber vs Lyft, Airbnb, Fitbit, Siri and Amazon Echo. Only rarely has anyone mentioned Google Now, and invariably that recommender is a Googler.

Google Now is truly amazing. Google Now is what you wish Siri was. Is the lack of awareness of this technology due to the name? Confusion with Siri? Difficulty in describing the technology with a short catchy phrase?

Maybe everyone but me is using Google Now and I just don’t realize it. One this is for certain, I am going to start asking around to my friends if they are using Google Now, and if they are not, strongly encourage them to try it out.

BRAINSTORMING ON WAYS TO ACCELERATE GOOGLE NOW ADOPTION AND AWARENESS

  1. New Name. Google Now lacks personality and differentation from the company name and search product.
  2. No More Siri Comparisons. Google Now is so much more than Siri. Google Now would benefit from coming up with a better comparison to describe the service.
  3. Cross Promote to Google Calendar Users. Calendar is the key killer app to get folks to understand the power and benefits of Google Now. Google Now can be promoted to Google Calendar users during sessions, on meeting reminder notifications, and meeting reminder emails.
  4. Tagline. I am not good at taglines, so I’ll defer to the experts. Perhaps “Now we know you” — “Never miss meetings, news, messages, and scores you care about.”
  5. Downplay the Voice-Activation. Again, by promoting the voice-activation capability of Google Now, users will consider this Google’s Siri product. Google can instead work towards a narrative showing how a user can get all their relevant info in one place.

Possible script:

1st Character: “Hopefully the traffic to our San Francisco meeting is not too bad.”

iPhone User: “Let me check AppleMaps”

Google Now User: “The estimated travel time is 43 minutes. The weather is 67 degrees, with light winds, the Giants are winning against the Dodgers 3–2 in the 4th inning, and the Nasdaq is up 82 points. I’ll start the navigation now.”

iPhone User: “How’d you do that?”

Google Now User: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Voice Over: “Google Now — All your meetings, travel, news, messages and scores are a click away.”

For the record, Google Now is supported on iOS.

Now if we could only figure out how to get Google Now to take out the trash.