Google Announces Support For 40 Third-Party App Cards In Google Now
by Brandon Chester on January 30, 2015 3:14 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Android
- Mobile
- Tablets
Google Now has always been good at giving you relevant information about things like transit, emails, stocks, sport scores, etc. But everything it displays is linked to a Google product in some way, which means that even with Google's vast accessible information, the scope of what information Google Now can provide is limited.
Today Google has announced an update for the Google application on Android. The update allows Google Now to display cards with relevant information from 40 different third party Android applications. The list of third party apps includes some big names like Lyft, Pandora, and Airbnb, and it's not hard to imagine how the ability to display relevant and actionable info in Google Now could make the experience of using these apps even better. The full list of partnered applications can be found here on the Google Now webpage, and you can see some example cards in the image above.
According to Google, the update to the core Google app on Android is rolling out now, and updates for cards from the developers Google has partnered with will be rolling out over the next few weeks. Google also intends to expand the library of supported third-party applications over time.
Source: Inside Search Blog
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noll - Saturday, January 31, 2015 - link
What does voice recognition have to do with adding new Google Now cards? Have you ever used Google Now?Murloc - Sunday, February 1, 2015 - link
to be fair, 10 years ago you had to train dragon naturally speaking for half an hour and even then it made lots of errors.Voice recognition in the smartphone era is actually usable.
The technology is finally here, now the problem is doing something useful with it.
It isn't worth it for certain stuff, but it definitely is for doing stuff when you're driving a car.
JeffFlanagan - Monday, February 2, 2015 - link
Amazingly usable. I was surprised to see that modern voice recognition still works while having a bad cold and very croaky voice.mr_tawan - Sunday, February 1, 2015 - link
It's much faster to do the input (if the voice is recognized properly) on the phone than typing in. I use it for searching/googling all the time.Alexvrb - Sunday, February 1, 2015 - link
Voice is great while you're driving.JeffFlanagan - Monday, February 2, 2015 - link
It's always going to be safer to talk to our devices than to be poking at touch-screens while driving, so it seems dumb to call this a publicity stunt.Amazon Echo proves that there's a benefit in voice-activated devices. It's the perfect bathroom music/news/weather device.
MichaelLC - Friday, February 13, 2015 - link
Not sure about your version, but I can say, "Ok, Google" "Weather" and it pulls up and reads the current weather based on my location. N5 with Lollipop.My immediate reaction about this news is not positive, however - just think it will be more ads and more resource hogging.
name99 - Saturday, January 31, 2015 - link
Technically how do these work? Are they based on something like XPC, or are they more like old-school plugins or COM?The point, in other words is
- how isolated are they from host processes? For both security and crash resistance.
- how structured is the communication between the host process and the card? Tight structure (like Apple imposes) is optimal for security (meaning things like you can control when 3rd party keyboards do and don't see text, and what they can do with that text). Non-structured communication means people can define new protocols as they wish, without requiring Google's intervention --- but mean that malicious cards have much more flexibility to cause problems, definitely on the spamming (ie write) side, maybe on the privacy (ie read) side.
Impulses - Saturday, January 31, 2015 - link
Aren't all the cards served from Google's servers? I imagine the can exert as much or as little control as they want, or are apps now able to serve cards without going thru the back end?