Sunday, November 4, 2012

Google Now is a better version of Siri than Siri

 I've owned a Google Nexus 7 for a while now, and I've enjoyed it a lot! Android 4.1/4.1 Jelly Bean is the first absolutely solid version of Android by every sense of the word. But one of my favorite features of Jelly Bean that does not receive much praise from the press is Google Now.

   Google Now really is a true competitor to Apple's Siri, and in my experience, is actually a heck of a lot better than Siri in functionality and stability. My last experience with Siri has not been excellent to begin with. Siri has been slow, and in many cases, did not provide the functionality promised by Apple.
So with Apple making a screwed up like Siri, Google took the liberty of building a kick-butt competitor called Google Now.

First off, the 'cards' interface is a brilliant UI design, which brings up information relevant to you, automatically, when it becomes relevant. Such as weather in your current location, restaurants near you, sports scores based on your Google search history, stock information, and more. It's quite impressive that Google added so much more capability than Apple did with Siri.


But to add onto it, Google adds something to Now that Apple never considered with Siri. Reliability. In as many as 9 out of 10 of queries that I've tried with Now has come up with correct results, while Siri seems to only provide about 3 or 4 out of 10. So the reliability rating of Now is much higher than that of its Cupertino-based competitor.


All in all, I must admit that Google Now is definitely one of my favorite features of Jelly Bean, and going forward, I hope to see Google expand on this in a way that will be even more useful than it already is.