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Comment by jonemo | Hacker News Reader

Is Google Now a useful utility for others? I recently activated it when I purchased a new phone and am having a hard time understanding how to use it. It's showing estimates for how long it will take me to get home or to work but they are always based on locations where I was a while ago and often outright ridiculous, e.g. 2 hours 30 mins to go from Alcatraz to my home, by bicycle? The other "cards" seem to show up randomly, like the stock quotes that are always up top when I want to see the weather and hidden when I want to see stock quotes. How do others make use of Google Now?

edit for clarification: I have set it up to prefer cycling, but Alcatraz is an island.

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For it to be really useful, you have to let Google know a bit more about yourself: you have to enable Search History and Location History. I think there's a separate option for access to your Gmail, too. Assuming you enable all this, you can get things like reminders for flights and shipments, it can remind you of topics you were searching for earlier, offer driving directions for places you've previously searched, movie times for movie trailers you've watched on Youtube, suggestions for nearby restaurants you might be interested in, etc.

I find it useful, but I'm completely in the Google ecosystem and don't have a problem with Google exposing all the data it knows about me.

Yes, you nailed it. The flight notifications and shipment logistics are the most useful things for me so far. It's great it you have FedEx or UPS deliveries a lot, and if you travel a lot.

And you're right that you have to be comfortable with exposing a lot of data. If you have all those things you mentioned turned off, the utility of it decreases.

One problem with flight notifications: If family/friends forward you their flight itineraries just to keep you in the loop, Google Now reminds you of their flights as well. It simply scrapes for the flight data; it doesn't check the email to see if its your flight.

Not really. Last week my dad came to visit me and forwarded the airline's email with the time of the flight. Google Now correctly stated the time I should leave to catch him at the airport. Seems to work fine for me on this issue.

It's been really frustrating, because it sometimes tells you what you want, but not always, and it's often pretty stupid.

"Oh, you're three minutes from home at the local starbucks that you go to every day? Here's the navigation card so you know how to get home."

"Oh, it's 2am, after a concert venue you've been to once, 50 miles from home? No navigation card for you. Instead enjoy this story about a basketball game that ended seven hours ago."

When it pops up the right card at the right moment it's awesome, but then you're frustrated when it doesn't, and there's no clear way to convince it to learn the right thing.

On top of that is Google's habit of making things that assume your mobile connection is 100% reliable and always available.

"Oh, you temporarily do not have a connection because T-Mobile's coverage is horrendous? This sounds like a great time to wipe all cards you had up and attempt to download them again."

"No, I can't let you set reminders because you're not connected to the internet."

In my experience it's only moderately helpful, and often plain useless, for exactly the reason you mention. It does not handle 'mixed modes' (or whatever you want to call it) at all. I have two places of work and sometimes work from home, but i can only set one location as work. I commute sometimes by bike or walking, sometimes by train, and rarely by car (but it does happen). But; according to Google you can only have one mode of transport. There's probably a pattern to my madness but it does not seem like Google is smart enough to find out (which is hard to believe). For now this is aimed at the american suburbanite soccer mom i guess (and as a, albeit european, semi-suburban dad i'm not even that far from that demographic).

I ended up disabling it after just a few days.

As for you, it didn't handle my locations at all. It picked up my home and work locations. Great. Except it kept showing me bus and train times after the bus or train in question had left. It kept showing me sports results - I'd rather read the phone book. It pretty much never showed me the information I'd like to see, and made it far harder to find the information I needed then and there vs. just bringing up the apps and bookmarks I already have.

Their voice recognition still has a <20% recognition rate for my accent (English w/Scandinavian accent), and that definitively does not make it any more useful.

Maybe in a few more years.

>> "It kept showing me sports results - I'd rather read the phone book."

There are only two reasons this should happen.

1. You googled the sports team

2. You have a sports team setup in the Google Now settings

On the card there should be a button in the top right to let you tell the system you don't want to see sports results too.

> 1. You googled the sports team

And this is my problem with Google Now. The concept isn't useful to me. Just because I googled a sports team once doesn't mean I constantly want updates about that team. Just because I looked up a company's stock one day doesn't mean I want to know what the stock is doing every day. Google Now doesn't seem to understand that.

Granted, the flight updates are a really cool feature. But the service as a whole is too noisy to be generally useful.

I am rather disappointed with Google Now. I recently took a flight, and it wasn't picked up at all, despite all the related emails in Gmail. I couldn't find a way to manually add a flight either.

The top card is always my employers stock quotes. I don't actually care how it moved during the day.

It shows the weather where I am, but I already had a home screen widget for that.

It shows directions to places I have been before, but I can never rely on a card to be there, so I rather open Maps directly.

For future reference to add just about anything manually to your google now, you can google search them from any synced chrome. When I'm planning a trip I do it on my desktop and it automatically appears on my phone.

I don't find it that useful or intuitive. It does keep me up to date on the weather where I am, but I can look out a window or use any of a bunch of widgets for real time/location weather. The destination service is always telling me how far work or home is away (regardless of my calendar) depending which one I am further from. The stocks doesn't seem to follow what I'm interested in too closely despite using Google Finance on the desktop. I do like when it has brought up flight details but this is not consistent enough to rely on. Currently it seems best for suggesting articles to read as it knows if I've been googling a topic or product.

Overall I'll keep adding my information manually and allowing passive collection. I have seen it improve quite a bit from it's earliest iteration . Getting Now working well will take some time. It has great potential utility if they nail it.

Google Now isn't perfect and does require a bit of tweaking. Assuming you're on Android, I'd try tapping on the three dot icon on cards to make sure they're set right (for instance, changing it so that Google knows you prefer driving to bicycling.) Also be sure to try the "wand" icon at the bottom for overall settings.

To make sure Google Now is up to date you can pull to refresh. For me it's never more than 20-30 minutes out of date.

Thanks for the hints. Seems like my Google Now works as expected then, but my lifestyle isn't (yet) supported...

The fact that it recommends I bicycle from Alcatraz is after informing it (through the icon with the three dots) I usually cycle, so that works right, sort of. My commute is bicycle+train, which unfortunately is not a combination of travel modes supported by Google Maps.

For me the "wand" displays 10 questions, which have a great deal of redundancy (5 out of the 10 are about the weather, for example.)

I wish it would pop up more cards by default that I could like/unlike, so it would learn more about my preferences over time.

I find it fantastic, but I travel a reasonable amount.

The other day I was waiting for a plane, and Now notified me the flight was cancelled nearly 10 minutes before the staff at the gate knew.

I just forward all my itineraries to my personal GMail account, and then Now tells me where my hotel is, what time check-in opens and it finds me restaurants nearby.

The one time where it really blew my mind is when it told me about updates to blogs I visit. I'd visit a blog on my desktop, then when I was checking my phone, it let me know there was an update. It was cool but at the same time a bit bothersome that Google was recording my sites.

As for the "where I was a while ago" - yes it does not track your position in real time. You have to refresh it manually to get the estimate from current position.

Everything it displays (which is not much) is most of the time ever irrelevant or redundant. I think the outside temperature is the only information I find useful.

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