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Google Now, the intelligent personal assistant added new updates - last week it could help you find your car and now it will remind you when you pass by any store that has the item you've been looking at online to buy.
Google, who calls their updates for the barely 2 year-old and rapidly expanding app "cards", have been consistently improving and adding functionality to Google Now. The latest being a friendly reminder when you pass by a store that has that brand new iPad case you've been looking at on Amazon to buy. It will display price, picture and product description just in case you forgot. You'll never have to wade through catalogues and websites of individual stores when Google Now can just keep track of who has what for you.
The service is however still in the early stages and will require at least a certain degree of cooperation and integration of store owners, but given Google's increasing integration in the daily lives and operations of just about everyone in one form or another, complete service will probably be sooner rather than later.
Google Now was first launched in 2012 coupled together with the release of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and was first supported by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus-series phones. In 2013, Google expanded their support to include iOS and in 2014, their own Google Chrome systems. Currently available functions and specialized cards of Google Now include traffic information specific to your scheduled route, weather forecasts, reminders that can be triggered by time or location, sports tracking, tracking of shipments and online orders, information on nearby events, reminder where you've parked your car, boarding pass, flight tracking, hotel navigation, restaurant reservations, keep track of birthdays, showtimes and ratings for what's out in the nearby cinema, new book releases, nearby concerts, real-time stock exchange information, public alerts, transit and commuting information, currency exchange rates, translation services, Fandango ticket service, Zillow real-estate service and more.
Though widely praised as a highly innovative and immensely useful app, critics have derided the voice-activation functionality similarly to Apple's Siri, and expressed concern over privacy issues with the app which collects information about its users in order to predict the information most useful to them.
