In the wake of the movie Her, the conversation surrounding intelligent virtual assistants has picked back up – not just about the existence of virtual assistants, but making them more intelligent, more lifelike, and more importantly, when. While many recognize Her as a future, more sophisticated version of Siri, there’s another virtual assistant in the game; Google Now. As the company explains, “Google Now works in the background so you don’t have to.” Sounds a lot to me like the promise of WebRTC.
Google Now is Google’s intelligent personal assistant for mobile devices, and it now making its way to desktops and laptops with the latest release of Chrome OS, version 34, in the dev channel. Google now provides information via cards, or small blocks of information based on information available to your Google account, such as current location, recent searches or calendar entries. The idea is delivering information to users before they even have to search for it.
Bringing Google Now to the desktop means users can see certain cards if they’re signed into Chrome, including weather, sports scores, commute traffic and event reminder cards – although some of these may be based on the location of their mobile device. Having Google Now on multiple devices requires users to manage location settings for each device independently.
Image via deviantART
The Chrome development channel is part of Google’s way to slowly roll out updates to users, starting with Canary channel builds up to Stable channel releases. The dev channel is between Canary and Stable, and is updated once or twice weekly and shows what the Chrome developers are working on.
WebRTC was first introduced in the dev channel in 2012, enabling developers to add real-time communication capabilities in their apps. The release of Chrome 23 introduced the integration of WebRTC in the browser. The ideas behind Google Now and WebRTC are not that different – it all comes down to making information and communication over the Internet accessible, real-time and high quality. And for end users, the experience is seamless, easy and fast.
Chrome OS version 34 could be available as soon as March or April, but it might not be until later in the year.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
