Google Now powers up by pulling in info from other apps
For a long time, Google Now has done a small number of things very well.
It can monitor your calendar and check current traffic information to tell you how long it鈥檒l take to get to your next appointment. It can pull information from your Gmail account to tell you when your Amazon package will arrive, or when you need to check in for your flight. But it hasn鈥檛 been able to go very far beyond those functions, until now.
Google announced on Friday that Google Now supports data from third-party apps, which means that those apps can add their input to your stack of Google Now notification cards.
The idea behind Google Now is that questions can be answered before you even ask them 鈥� the service gets to know your interests and even your habits over time, so it can predict what information you鈥檒l want to see at any given time. Now that third-party apps can feed data to Google Now, it should be even better at showing you things you鈥檒l actually find useful and interesting.
Pandora, for example, can make music recommendations. EBay can update you on the status of an auction in which you鈥檙e bidding. The Guardian and The Economist can suggest news stories you might be interested in. Google Now should be a much more useful service going forward, because it鈥檒l be informed by the apps you use every day.
Google Now right now, and Google will undoubtedly invite more companies to add Google Now support in the coming days and weeks. Google Now functionality is contextual, which means apps will offer you information automatically only when it鈥檚 relevant 鈥� so, for example, you might see traffic information from Waze when you鈥檙e in the car, or ride-sharing information from Lyft if you鈥檙e at the airport.
Although these notifications can be triggered by location, your location won鈥檛 actually be shared with third-party apps through Google Now. In fact, Google Now user data isn鈥檛 shared with these apps at all 鈥� the data only flows from third-party apps to Google Now, not the other way around. Users who are concerned about privacy, or who simply aren鈥檛 interested in the service, can turn it off by visiting Google Now鈥檚 鈥淲eb and App Activity鈥� settings page and disallowing the service from using data from third-party apps.
Google Now鈥檚 third-party support only extends to Android for now, although Google may ultimately decide to let iPhone and iPad users in on the action, too.
