Move over, Siri. Google Now is coming to the iPhone, iPad.

Google Now launches this week on iOS, as part of an update to the Google Search app. 

|
Google
Google Now launches this week for the Apple iPad and iPhone.

Back in July of 2012, Google launched a digitized personal assistant known as Google Now. The platform, which was clearly intended to compete with Apple's Siri, was originally available only for Android tablets and smart phones. This week, it finally hits the iPhone and iPad, as an update to the already-formidable Google Search iOS app

"Google Now is about giving you just the right information at just the right time," Google's Andrea Huey wrote in a blog post today. "It can show you the day’s weather as you get dressed in the morning, or alert you that there’s heavy traffic between you and your butterfly-inducing date – so you’d better leave now! It can also share news updates on a story you’ve been following, remind you to leave for the airport so you can make your flight and much more."

Google Now is organized by "cards" that show information meant only for you – local train schedules, for instance, or a 10-day weather forecast. You can use Now to remind you of upcoming appointments, or to make sure a particularly important event gets on the calendar; as is the case with Apple's Siri, the whole orchestra of information can be managed by voice control. Handy! 

Of course, as Ryan Paul of Ars Technica noted last summer, when Google Now was first trotted out, the platform may be good for consumers, but it's also very, very good for Google. 

"Google Now clearly dovetails with Google’s business model and long-term business interests," Mr. Paul noted. "The amount of functionality that Google can offer through this service is directly tied to the amount of personal information people are willing to give the company, making Now a perfect fit for Google’s ambition of organizing the world’s information." 

Indeed, any current subscribers to the old Google is Skynet meme are unlikely to start using Now, a platform that gulps down and digests user data by the gigabyte. ("Confirmed: Google's Siri-Esque Personal Assistant Is Creepy," reads the headline of one skeptical piece on Google Now.) 

In related news, earlier this month, after a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union raised some concerns about the service, Apple acknowledged that it keeps data collected by Siri on hand for two years (although Apple says that after six months, that data is effectively anonymized, or separated from the ID of the user who made the request). More here

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Move over, Siri. Google Now is coming to the iPhone, iPad.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0429/Move-over-Siri.-Google-Now-is-coming-to-the-iPhone-iPad
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe