The author brings up an interesting example where Google Now provides him a tool to automatically identify and describe a TV show he is watching at night. When he later tries to demo this feature to his friend during the day, it simply does not appear.

The author takes this as an example of Google Now being very smart and learning from his behavior. It knows he watches TV at night so it provides him the identification feature during that time period. It doesn't provide it to him during the day, because it knows he isn't usually watching TV during the day (at least this is the author's assumption).

I take away a different message from this example and it is part of the reason I am very skeptical of software like Siri or Google Now.

Fundamentally I believe the one of the most important features of a software application is that it is predictable. When I do 'X', I expect the program to do 'Y' always. If it can't do 'Y' because of certain situations, I should get an explicit, informative error message.

The author's TV example is an illustration of deep unpredictability. It is quite possible that he is right and there are powerful learning algorithms driving the Google Now's behavior in this case. But all I see is unpredictability.

Yes, I want to customize and shape software to my own identity and patterns. But unless I control that process, I am likely to become very frustrated, very fast as a software application changes under my feet.