Google Now: The Future
(this was written on May 28th, 2015 — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-now-future-christopher-ziobehr?trk=pulse_spock-articles)
Google Now, Siri and other type smart thinking technologies have been at the forefront of making life easier. But they aren’t that smart. What is the future? Today we saw Google announce the updates to Google Now. The updates include in-app knowledge, this is one of the most exciting updates that you’ll never realize you needed. An update that makes Google now context aware of what you’re looking at will change the way you process information. Let’s use an example. You get an email on your phone that says, “Hey Chris, I’d love to go check out Mad Max, how does your afternoon look like?”. You can simply say “Okay Google Now, check movie times” (On an android phone) and Google Now will bring up movie times specific to Mad Max. This is hugely relevant to what you’re looking at. Meaning it understands what’s on your screen and determine the best results.
Automation of context is hugely important. You can’t begin to automate your life without a huge knowledge pool of what is contextually relative to what you’re looking to automate. While looking at the relevant context, it seems appropriate that you would be able to easily produce automation’s, in reality it is quite challenging. Very impressive that Google has been able to do it in a natural way. They have started this process in the past with Google now live tiles.
As an example, it follows the teams I like, as shown to the left. It can also show travel directions to the next probable place I am headed. However it really only focuses on going home or to work. Which often there are way more places I am headed.
There have been a lot of bland focuses of Google Now live tiles in the past, however now we are starting to arrive at what the future will look like in digital automation. Building in smart context, you can help accelerate the data to support digital automation.
I have to tip my hat to Google for taking on this monumental process. They are really looking to make an actual change in how data is presented and taking dumb data and providing smart information on its context. The entire ecosystem is really where it matters, everything has to work together in order to get it right. We’re just at the forefront of this “smart” technology. Apple is up next to the plate…
We will see what Apple does next month at WWDC on June 8th. In a tweet I made a few weeks ago, I think they will focus on home automation and finally make the IoT actually relevant to automating the home through a smart hub. I think they will build that smart hub into the apple tv and it will be a center console for your home. Google also announced Weave today, but since I am not sure how many people are interested in learning about the IoT I kept my post focused on Google Now. If you’re interested to read a post from me about that, leave your comments below :)
