Google Now Voice Commands

I've been intending to write this post for a while but couldn't find time (procrastination, you know :-P) . But here it is! Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant from Google and comes default with 4.1 Jelly Bean, a flavor of the android operating system. I've been amazed by this technology ever since it was demonstrated at the 2012 Google I/O. It answers questions, gets directions, sets alarms, makes recommendations and performs various actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. The interface is awesome, it depicts information with the help of cards. You'll be seeing their screenshots later in this post.

The main feature that makes Google Now awesome and better than it's competitors which include Siri and S-Voice is it's voice recognition and intuition. Yeah right, intuition. Google  Now takes out information like airport tickets from a person's Gmail account and generates a card showing the person's boarding pass! It generates a card from the person's search history. For  example you searched about a basketball team and you'll see a card which will allow you to buy tickets for a match in which that team plays again! Whenever you are away at work, it will generate a card showing you the shortest and less traffic infested route back to your house! i searched about Galaxy S4 on Google and bam! There was a card waiting for me in Google Now.

Specialized cards currently comprise of : 

• Activity Summary(Walking)
• Birthday
• Events
• Flights
• Movies 
• News
• Meetings
• Photo Spot nearby
• Package Tracking
• Places
• Public Alerts
• Public Transit
• Research Topics
• Sports 
• Stock
• Traffic Updates
• Attractions nearby while traveling
• Time Back Home
• Translate
• Weather

Phew! :-P

Last Sunday, I got my Nexus 4 and I've been playing with Google Now a lot! To start asking questions, you just have to tap on the mic icon shown in the image or say "Google"  after you've already opened Google Now after swiping up from the Home key.

Let us discuss about some of the voice actions which I came across!

1. Open an App
   
   You can say "Open [app]" to open an app. For example, "Open Camera" opens the camera app.
   
                                              
2. Set an Alarm
   
   To quickly set an alarm, say "Set an alarm for [time]" or "Set an alarm for [time] from now". You can also add a label For example "Alarm for 6 Hours Wake Up."
   
                                              
3. Make a note
   
   To make a note, say "Note to self" and continue talking to add words to your note. It will create a note both in audio and text which will be emailed to your Gmail account, so that you can listen to the exact words you said !
   
                                              
4. Create a Calendar Event
   
   You can just say "Create a calendar event : Lunch in New Delhi, Monday at noon"
   
                                              
5. Send an Email
   
   Voice actions can be used to send an entire email. For example, you could say that "Send email to Vinayak Mehta, subject, Test email, message, Testing Google Voice actions"
   
6. Send a Message
   
   Voice actions can send text messages in the same way it can send emails! For example. you could say "Send SMS to Pranu Sarna, message, Hey"
7. Make a Phone Call
   
   To make a phone call, just say "Call" followed by the phone number or the name of the contact.
   
                                            
8. Scan a Barcode
   
   You don't need a third party barcode scanner app on your phone, whenever you want to scan a barcode or a QR code you just gotta say "Scan a Barcode"  and boom! Google will give you a barcode scanner.