Last year we heard that Apple was moving away from its licensed voice recognition technology from Nuance and building its own team to create a neural-net deep learning system as used by Google and Microsoft.  To date I have not heard any big announcement on how far they have progressed, but they may want to push down on the gas if they do not want to see users leaving Siri and moving to Cortana. Although Siri was a great feature when it was first released, the addition of voice actuated watches, TV, cares and more IoT voice enabled objects coming on the scene, intelligent voice assistant technology supported across multiple devices will become highly desired to expected functionality in the near future.  And right now Siri is not meeting the new coming standard, but they may not be too worried.   Mature Google Voice has been on iOS for more than a year and I have not heard anyone who had dropped Siri for Now, not because Siri is better, but because they are used to it and its a default voice system. However, given a significantly better system, that could change.

Essentially, this is Google’s answer to Apple’s virtual voice assistant Siri for iOS, which remembers important dates on your calendar, reminds you of appointment times, and allows you to search the web via voice controls. However, Google Now goes a bit above and beyond this concept by taking the data from your daily routine, search history, and other user behavior.

For instance, Google Now will learn your daily commute home. And if there’s particularly congested traffic that would cause you to get home much later, it’ll send you a notification suggesting alternate routes. Another thing it does is update you on restaurants/retail stores as you’re walking past them, provides reviews of those stores, and other recommendations.

I really love the driving aspect of this.  The more I learn about Android 4.1 jelly bean, the more I’m thinking my next phone could be an android.