Is the New "Google Now" Assistant a Siri Killer?
Most of us have wished for a personal assistant at some point in our professional lives. Whether our supervisor has one, or even if we’ve only seen them on TV or the movies, we’ve dreamt of having someone else handle the small yet time consuming tasks that seem to take up a majority of our days.
Then Siri came along and, while some debate her usefulness, many iPhone users delight at her ability to make phone calls, set alarm clocks, and even give sports scores with only a verbal request for her to do so. While Siri’s competitors have come and gone without much notice, her newest challenger offers something that Siri can’t do—but only if you’re willing to give something in return.
Google Now’s main selling point over Siri and other voice-activated virtual assistants is that you don’t actually have to ask it for information. Local weather, highway traffic, flight cancellations, and those ever important sports scores are all updated in real time and announced to you—without your having to lift a finger.
The way this all works—and Google’s CEO Larry Page doesn’t beat around the bush when explaining it—is simple:
If you're searching for a particular person, you want the results for that person—not everyone else with the same name. These are hard problems to solve without knowing your identity, your interests, or the people you care about.
Google is smart to build this kind of functionality as many of us become frustrated when search results are full of information that we weren’t looking for, or even when we ask Siri a question and she has the nerve to have to consult the web, requiring us to find the answer ourselves. Time will tell if people are comfortable sharing every detail of our lives—and our loved ones—all for the sake of convenience and speed.
While enthusiasts of Apple—and arguably privacy—may still favor Siri, the below video of just how Google Now works is impressive to say the least. Larry Page’s claim that voice recognition and the return of minutely personalized, live information amounts to much more than just “hard problems to solve.”
