Google Now is an amazing digital assistant, there’s no doubt about that. But when it comes to personalization, the Google engine falls a little short of a Siri or a Cortana. Post comparison, you can easily make out how vague the services of Now have been until now. This however, is about to change.
And the change my dear Android folks could come soon as there have been numerous reports of a new feature called Explore Interests in the wild, that could just be Google’s answer to the customization game.
We can’t say that Google Now completely lacked customization according to the users need. The service, until now, used a series of on/off toggle switches in the app’s settings to tell the service what you like and what you don’t. These features were a bit hidden, though and many users didn’t even know they existed. We also were presented with a series of different cards which we could either choose to follow or tell Now that you aren’t interested in such topics.
The new feature brings in a fair amount of personalization services. The service brings in many new features and improvements to assist the predictive search facilities. Explore Interests allows you to add things you’re interested in for Google to track and update you on.
The service will allow you to “pick teams, bands, movies, and more”. Once you select this option, you are redirected to a page containing colourful tiles detailing sections like “Sports,” “TV,” “Movies,” “Musicians,” “People,” “Stocks” and more. In each section, you can keep pressing the (+) sign to add any topics you’d like to follow and scroll down to the next.
For now, Google has officially stated that the service described above is rolling out slowly to a select few devices as an experiment. Apparently, the web giant is testing with the look-and-feel of the product. The official rollout is a little way down into the future.
One interesting thing is that when Explore Interests eventually makes it onto all devices worldwide, in time users may be able to track almost anything directly through Google. No more digging around to check if a rumour is legit, no more long queries to learn about your favourite band, Now will bring everything right down to your homescreen.
