Awesome Things You Can Do With Google Now

Having Google Now is like owning a personal assistant, giving you the ability to manage, search for and organize your information easily within your phone. Your related searches, flight tickets, restaurant reservation, friends’ location and more are presented in specific and minimalistic Google Now cards. Get the most out of Google Now with the following tips and tricks. Its a very handy product if you are the kind of person who needs information at your fingertips all the time.

If you're leaving town, Google Now knows it—and can provide you with a ton of useful information. If you're flying, it'll keep track of your flight (using information from your email confirmation), let you know when to leave the airport, and have your boarding pass ready for you when you get there. It'll also help you out with hotel information, car rentals, show you nearby places and events, photo spots, and—if you're out of the country—even provide you with cards for translation and currency conversion. Basically, any time you're out of town, pull up Google Now and it'll have everything you might need at the ready.

All the searches that you do on Google Now will be finetuned and condensed into a research topic that is based on your search queries and the links you click into. To check out what your past searches revolve around, check out your research topics here. Your search will appear together with other similar contents and will be put accordingly into categories. The categories that are available are Fresh Content, Forums, Reviews, Videos, Music, People, TV Shows and Webpages.

Google Now does all its data gathering in the background. Yes, this can put a slight hit on your battery life -- but no more so than any other application that updates data in the background. If you're concerned more about your battery life than you are the convenience Google Now adds to the mobile experience, you'll need to disable the feature and manually gather your information. If you're happy with your device's battery life (even with background data on), enjoy Google Now.

You probably already know that Google Now will provide tracking information for packages you've ordered online. But it also helps you shop in the real world, too. If you walk into a mall, it'll tell you what stores are available, and if you've researched a product recently, it'll even tell you if you're near a store that carries it. Talk about handy!

When you search for a movie, book, TV show, music artist, or video game on Google, it'll remember—and give you information about it in Google Now. You can even tell Google to remind you about upcoming episodes, so you know when your favorite shows start. If you head into Now's Customize menu, you can tell it your cable provider and on demand services (like Netflix and Hulu) and it'll adjust its cards for those services.

If you have an network-connected TV, things get even more interesting. Google Now will detect your TV and you can tell it to "listen" to what you're watching. It'll then provide you with more information about that show.

Google Now will also pull data from your location. If you're paranoid about your privacy, you might be less willing to set up location services. But if you aren't so concerned about having your privacy invaded, you can configure your device to enable Location & Google Search | Show Recent Searches from within the Privacy settings (Android). From within Google Now settings, inside the Accounts & Privacy section, enable Web History and Personal Results. On that same screen, tap Google Location Settings and make sure Location is enabled.

If you have an event or a concert coming up, and the ticket was emailed to you, Google Now is nice enough to give you a heads up t. Not only it will tell you when you should leave, but will also give you one-tap access to the email along with your tickets. You can even scan the tickets from Google Now as it integrates with Fandango.

If Location History and Location Reporting are enabled on your phone, you will have a card from Google Now that takes your phone's accelerometer (Android only) into consideration and estimates how far you have biked/ walked/ biked. But remember that if these Google Now features are enabled, it will log everywhere you go—something that you might not be comfortable with.

You have Google Cards, and you have Gmail Cards. If you usually make reservations or bookings and receive the confirmation of these reservations via your Gmail, you can allow Google Now to access your account for these reservations and pull them into more organized cards. You can enable this feature in the Google Now Menu via Settings > Google Now > Gmail Cards.These include flight bookings, hotels and restaurants, even packages you are expecting among others.

How’s this for some personal assistant touch? If you regularly upload photos to your Google+ you can search through your photos via Google. For example if you really love going ot the beach and have a lot of photos of the beach, just search for ‘my photos of beaches’ to get the photos you are looking for. Currently, this is only available in the US and if you are logged in to your Google+ account.

When you create an event in your Google calendar, be sure to add a location. Google Now will then tell you when you need to leave your current location to arrive on time – a big help for those constantly on the go. These locations can be added to Google Calendar events from either the mobile calendar (one that is integrated with your Google account) or from the Google Calendar web app. Either way, that information will sync with Google Now.