Suck It, Siri: 'Google Now' Puts You to Shame

Steve Kovach says Android voice assistant better at 'pretty much everything'
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 2, 2012 1:33 PM CDT
Suck It, Siri: 'Google Now' Puts You to Shame
Hugo Barra, Director of Google Product Management, talks about Google Now, at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, June 27, 2012.   (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

Disappointed with Siri? Well, maybe you should ditch your fancy iPhone, because the upcoming Google Now "is a lot more impressive," writes Steve Kovach of Business Insider. After using Google Now for a few days, he's concluded that it "fills in all the gaps left by Siri, and does pretty much everything else a whole lot better. This is how search should work on mobile devices."

Among its features:

  • If you've got a meeting, it will alert you when you should leave—taking traffic into account.
  • Search for a sports team's score often enough, and it'll start sending you score notifications automatically.
  • Taking a flight? It'll figure out your flight number based on your search history and automatically keep you updated on gate info and delays.
But the main event is the beautiful search engine. "Not only is Google Now better than Siri at pulling up relevant information, but it's also nearly instantaneous," Kovach gushes; searches for even esoteric info like "How old is Jim Romenesko?" yielded answers in less than a second. Of course, hardware companies are notoriously slow at rolling out Android updates, so it might be a while before you actually get to use Google Now. "And that stinks," writes Kovach. "iPhone users have no idea what they're missing." Click for Kovach's full column. (More Google Android stories.)

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