Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How Google Now is Taking Over!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and as we dive into nexus 5 coverage and a whole bunch of other awesome things coming very soon. I noticed something – and i doubt i’m the first one to notice this at all, but i want to share it anyway. Android and google, now together right now, are poised to take over completely at least on paper. Over the past few months, google now has become a bigger and bigger part of android and android has become a bigger and bigger part of the world’s market share. Let me give you a timeline: when google now first started off, it was just google search which was the persistent search box at the top of your android home screen.
It was always there every android phone had it and that’s all it did was google search when android 4.1 jellybean launched google now was revealed as a full app a full service. That would give you predictive information, so it would use information about you and what you google, to give you weather and stocks and basic information before you needed it. This was in july 2012 and it was only available for nexus devices. Since then, google now has gotten a lot better.
It’S added a lot of features and it’s gotten more accurate and more useful. It got its first major update in october of 2012 that plugged it into gmail that gave it your tracking information for package, shipping, emails, hotel information and check-in confirmations, etc. It also got news cards event cards, people, sports cards and more. It also added a hot phrase.
So every time you said, google, it would start a voice search, and that was later revised to ok. Google in december of last year got another major update, which plugged into some airline systems, which let you use google. Now, as your boarding pass to get onto a plane, i have used this and, along with all these updates, that it’s getting, it’s also quickly becoming more and more available for just about every new device that comes out so now, every device with android 4.0 or later Can use google now, even if it’s not a nexus iphone users have google now and they’re, loving it with android 4.4 kitkat and the nexus 5 here in november of 2013, google now has again taken another step forward inside of android.
Now, when you swipe all the way to the left of your home screens boom, that is a dedicated panel for google now and that’s how you’ll be able to access it. And then, when you swipe back over to your home screens, you’re still in google, now you’re still in google search and google, now the whole google experience launcher is all packaged together in one big, google search and google now app and that’s why, when you swipe back Into your home screen on the nexus 5, you can still say: ok, google and it’ll open a google search, because it’s still listening to you because you’re still in google now it’s almost become its own little operating system, its own little ecosystem of things that it works. Really well with and things that it plugs into and plug into it, not just the obvious things like google services, but third-party things like restaurants and shipping services and and stores and events and concerts.
All these other things will filter into it, because it’s working with them i’ll have a link in the description right below, with, like a just a giant grid, a list of official third-party supported things that plug into google. Now, before i go overboard here, let me tell you that google now is not perfect. Besides all the excellent things that they keep, adding to it and all the functionality that they keep updating alongside it, there are some glaring gaps in functionality. Google now will allow you to open applications on your phone.
So, theoretically you know you can control your whole phone with it, but it doesn’t do any sort of hardware control. So if i were to ask my phone, for example, okay, google turn off wi-fi uh. It wouldn’t do that. It would actually give me a card that says that this action is not supported now, normally, when something isn’t supported, it just doesn’t recognize it and it just googles whatever you said and gives you the results.
That’Ll help you, but because they actually have a card there, that has this device function is not supported. That means they thought about it. They thought about it, but right now, which is straight up, doesn’t work, so i don’t know if they have plans to make it work, but i really hope they do. Another thing is search with.
Camera is now gone like it totally disappeared, and no one actually knows why, a while back it had the functionality in full, where you could get this update, where you could say: okay, google, what is this and it would open up the camera, and you could point It at something and it would use image recognition to search for and find a phrase that would describe what you’re looking at with the camera. It was so useful. You got logos, you got text, you got landmarks, all sorts of things, and now it’s just not there anymore.
With the 2.5 update actually of google search in the play store, the functionality just gets turned off and you can see it in the code. It got turned off, it has a name and everything please bring that back, but google, now, whether you like it or not, is everywhere iphones. Have it ipads? Have it android phones, have it uh, android tablets? Have it, and now even wearables that run android like google glass have it and the google smartwatch that will happen will have google now trust me when there are smart watches that all run android in 2014, people aren’t gon na want, like full-fledged android home screens, on Their wrists with widgets and everything like that, they might just want google now cards and that’s really useful when there are refrigerators that run android in 2015, they’re not going to want a full-fledged android home screen with widgets on their refrigerator.
They might just want google now cards and that’s going to be really useful. So that brings us to the whole point of the takeover. The whole mission, if you will it’s a quote from sundar pachai, who is the head of android at google right now, and the quote is, as we get on our journey and reach the next billion people, we want to do it on the latest version of android.
The latest version of android is android 4.4 kitkat, and if you watched my last video about it, you’ll know that the biggest most important feature of it is that it’s much lighter much more memory efficient than any other version of recent android has ever been, and that’s Not only to work on lower end devices and older devices like smartphones, but that’s to also be the first operating system that really makes sense to be used on wearables, like google, glass, like smart watches and even appliances like refrigerators, android 4.4 can be the sort of Backbone, the skeleton behind the scenes and google now and its cards and all its functionality and features can be the face. I know it’s not the end of 2013 yet, but for 2014 really high on the list of things you want to look out for in tech. Is going to be the proliferation of google now at least alongside android, as android spreads into new form factors and new markets? So will google now and google now will be very important alongside that and it’ll be taking all over a lot of people’s home screens? And that’s why i said like at the beginning of the video it looks like a takeover waiting to happen. Okay, google, you .