Hacker News Reader

Comment by Irregardless | Hacker News Reader

> Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago.

Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It's usually known as "that annoying thing that keeps popping up in my notification bar".

Everyone in the IT industry understands the frustration of trying to help people who are unwilling to change and insist on repeating history. Most of us don't give up quite as easily though...

View on HN

I find some of Google Now's features pretty awesome, perhaps creepily so.

I get an email with someone's itinerary, and on the days of his flights, Now shows me all the up-to-date flight schedules.

I look up how long it'd take to get somewhere on Google Maps on my PC, and in my car, Now is ready to navigate and tells me how long it'd take.

Lots of little things like that do add up to something useful.

I also think it may not have been possible 4 years ago, simply because it relies on a deeper level of spying on the users which didn't exist 4 years ago.

Your (lack of) use of Google Now is unrelated to the difficulty of the problem.

Predictive analytics is an interesting engineering challenge, and is probably what appeals to the author. On the other hand, re-solving the same web problems repeatedly is not.

That's shortsighted, this is what Google Now, can do.. well, right now. But in the future it will be extended to make your life easier, i.e tell you when you get close to a cinema that is displaying a movie of a director that you like, telling you that this near theater is performing a show that you really liked 2 years ago, etc.

These are not exactly stellar examples. The ones that I've seen that are good are:

  * Let you know that meeting you have will be tough to make it to due to traffic/you haven't left yet.
  * ...

Ok, so there is really only one good use case I know of. The others are items that, if I am not searching for it, I don't think I really want to know about it.

So, can you give some good expansions of that etc?

From a product perspective, I can't see how it is exciting or new. Maybe there are some fancy gears under the hood, though.

I don't have it on my Nexus 4. If I left on all the notifications apps on my phone, I would be getting one every 2 or 3 minutes. I don't need another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com