Hipsters take note, there is a new smartphone personal assistant on its way: Google Now. It’s a search-centric, voice-powered digital assistant for the upcoming version of Android that launches mid-July.

These words may haunt the ghost of Steve Jobs when he spoke of Siri in 2010:

[It’s] not a search company. We have no plans to go into the search business. We don’t care about it. Other people do it well.

That they do.

Enter: Google Now.

Google announced Google Now, a search-centric, voice-powered digital assistant for the upcoming version of Android called Jelly Bean at its recent I/O Keynote presentation. And it looks like a whole lot of rad.

Steve Kovach, of Business Insider, speaks highly of the new product:

I’ve been using Jelly Bean on a Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 for the last few days. And I can say Google Now is a lot more impressive than Siri. Google Now fills in all the gaps left by Siri, and does pretty much everything else a whole lot better. This is how search should work on mobile devices.

I was in San Francisco last week to cover Google I/O and meet with some other companies in the area. I had a meeting in Mountain View on Friday morning. Google Now sent me a notification about 45 minutes before my meeting that said I should leave if I wanted to make it on time. It even took traffic into account. Incredible.

The other night I was getting dinner with a few old journalism friends from college. We were talking about Jim Romenesko, and one of my friends wondered how old he was. I asked Google Now, “How old is Jim Romenesko?” The answer came up in less than a second.

I’m a Mets fan (unfortunately), so a lot of my sports-related Google searches are for the score of the latest game. Google knows this, so Google Now automatically sends me notifications with the latest score. I don’t even have to ask anymore.

I took the red eye back to New York Friday night, and spent the hours before my flight drinking with some PR friends in San Francisco’s Mission neighbourhood. Based on my search history, Google Now already knew my flight number and kept me updated with gate information and potential delays.

And Google Now is fast. I spoke with Hugo Barra, Google’s Android product boss, the other day, and he told me the Google Now team spent months shaving seconds off the response time. It shows. Not only is Google Now better than Siri at pulling up relevant information, but it’s also nearly instantaneous.

Compare that speed to Siri. Depending on how well Apple’s servers are doing on a given day, it can take several painful seconds for Siri to pull up an answer.

Google Now is exactly what I want in a virtual assistant. I don’t need cutesy jokes and quips about which smartphone is the best. I need answers. And Google Now provides me with the answers I want. The end. (Sometimes I don’t even have to ask. Google Now just knows what I need. Incredible.)

Here are some of the features packed into Google Now:

• If you’ve got a meeting, it will alert you when you should leave—taking traffic into account.

• Search for a sports team’s score often enough, and it’ll start sending you score notifications automatically.

• Taking a flight? It’ll figure out your flight number based on your search history and automatically keep you updated on gate info and delays.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, that might be the case, for now, as Kovach summarises:

Only about 7% of devices are running Ice Cream Sandwich, the current version of Android that launched about seven months ago. Almost everyone else is running Gingerbread, a version of Android that launched in late 2010.

Still, at face value, this looks like a good product, and will be another calculated chess move from Google.

[Source: BusinessInsider, Google]