I haven't used Microsoft Cortana, so I'm not sure if it's any good, but they reportedly get one thing Google completely misses: people want a personal assistant, not a creepy stalker. A personal assistant takes care of the kinds of tasks you tell him or her to handle; a stalker does things he or she thinks you want. Big difference. My personal assistant would schedule meetings at work. My stalker would send my mistress flowers for her birthday.

There's supposed to be a little menu you can bring up on any card where you can tweak the settings. You didn't get one?

(Note: I'm not trying to blame the user here -- if the menu isn't discoverable, that's Google's problem to fix.)

This is reminding me of tabs for gmail. They'll figure out for you what you want to see, you don't get to tell them.

I had the same annoying outcome as well. You can turn off just notifications from Google Now by clicking on the bell icon in your menubar (if you're on a Mac - do the equivalent on Windows/Linux) then clicking on the settings (gear icon) and then in there you can untick Google Now

Thanks for the flags tip!

I had the same problem - I was able to fix it by going to about:flags and disabling 'enable experimental ui for notifications'. This prevents chrome from using the native osx notification center, and instead uses a bell icon in the menubar. It also fixed the weather notifications issue for me.

Well, I don't know how Google Now works but I presume there is a machine learning component in there and it should get better as you have lot more data to train the model. So, may be its early to dismiss such a product very soon.

Just swipe it to the side a few times and it will be gone.

For it to be really useful, you have to let Google know a bit more about yourself: you have to enable Search History and Location History. I think there's a separate option for access to your Gmail, too. Assuming you enable all this, you can get things like reminders for flights and shipments, it can remind you of topics you were searching for earlier, offer driving directions for places you've previously searched, movie times for movie trailers you've watched on Youtube, suggestions for nearby restaurants you might be interested in, etc.

I find it useful, but I'm completely in the Google ecosystem and don't have a problem with Google exposing all the data it knows about me.

It's been really frustrating, because it sometimes tells you what you want, but not always, and it's often pretty stupid.

"Oh, you're three minutes from home at the local starbucks that you go to every day? Here's the navigation card so you know how to get home."

"Oh, it's 2am, after a concert venue you've been to once, 50 miles from home? No navigation card for you. Instead enjoy this story about a basketball game that ended seven hours ago."

When it pops up the right card at the right moment it's awesome, but then you're frustrated when it doesn't, and there's no clear way to convince it to learn the right thing.

In my experience it's only moderately helpful, and often plain useless, for exactly the reason you mention. It does not handle 'mixed modes' (or whatever you want to call it) at all. I have two places of work and sometimes work from home, but i can only set one location as work. I commute sometimes by bike or walking, sometimes by train, and rarely by car (but it does happen). But; according to Google you can only have one mode of transport. There's probably a pattern to my madness but it does not seem like Google is smart enough to find out (which is hard to believe). For now this is aimed at the american suburbanite soccer mom i guess (and as a, albeit european, semi-suburban dad i'm not even that far from that demographic).

I ended up disabling it after just a few days.

As for you, it didn't handle my locations at all. It picked up my home and work locations. Great. Except it kept showing me bus and train times after the bus or train in question had left. It kept showing me sports results - I'd rather read the phone book. It pretty much never showed me the information I'd like to see, and made it far harder to find the information I needed then and there vs. just bringing up the apps and bookmarks I already have.

Their voice recognition still has a <20% recognition rate for my accent (English w/Scandinavian accent), and that definitively does not make it any more useful.

Maybe in a few more years.

I am rather disappointed with Google Now. I recently took a flight, and it wasn't picked up at all, despite all the related emails in Gmail. I couldn't find a way to manually add a flight either.

The top card is always my employers stock quotes. I don't actually care how it moved during the day.

It shows the weather where I am, but I already had a home screen widget for that.

It shows directions to places I have been before, but I can never rely on a card to be there, so I rather open Maps directly.

I don't find it that useful or intuitive. It does keep me up to date on the weather where I am, but I can look out a window or use any of a bunch of widgets for real time/location weather. The destination service is always telling me how far work or home is away (regardless of my calendar) depending which one I am further from. The stocks doesn't seem to follow what I'm interested in too closely despite using Google Finance on the desktop. I do like when it has brought up flight details but this is not consistent enough to rely on. Currently it seems best for suggesting articles to read as it knows if I've been googling a topic or product.

Overall I'll keep adding my information manually and allowing passive collection. I have seen it improve quite a bit from it's earliest iteration . Getting Now working well will take some time. It has great potential utility if they nail it.

Google Now isn't perfect and does require a bit of tweaking. Assuming you're on Android, I'd try tapping on the three dot icon on cards to make sure they're set right (for instance, changing it so that Google knows you prefer driving to bicycling.) Also be sure to try the "wand" icon at the bottom for overall settings.

To make sure Google Now is up to date you can pull to refresh. For me it's never more than 20-30 minutes out of date.

I find it fantastic, but I travel a reasonable amount.

The other day I was waiting for a plane, and Now notified me the flight was cancelled nearly 10 minutes before the staff at the gate knew.

I just forward all my itineraries to my personal GMail account, and then Now tells me where my hotel is, what time check-in opens and it finds me restaurants nearby.

The one time where it really blew my mind is when it told me about updates to blogs I visit. I'd visit a blog on my desktop, then when I was checking my phone, it let me know there was an update. It was cool but at the same time a bit bothersome that Google was recording my sites.

As for the "where I was a while ago" - yes it does not track your position in real time. You have to refresh it manually to get the estimate from current position.

Everything it displays (which is not much) is most of the time ever irrelevant or redundant. I think the outside temperature is the only information I find useful.

On top of that, having services with an understanding of a four year old child push things into my information stream is really rather annoying. If I want to know I'll ask. Otherwise someone mature around me, who knows me well, will tell me, and will not be tempted to be sharing all they know about me with someone else at the drop of an invisible court order.

I'm also uncomfortable with the way Google collects so much user data. I wouldn't go so far as saying it's creepy though - they don't do anything sinister or nefarious with your data, but they do have an insatiable appetite to track and record as much of your online activity as they can.

They can track you across mobile, desktop and tablet devices. They have a desktop OS (ChromeOS) that potentially tracks everything you do online - whether you're running apps or browsing the web. You have to sign in to do anything - even to print to your desktop printer; all print jobs are routed through their cloud print service. Over the course of a few months or a year, Google will potentially know more about your online behaviour than you do.

Google's fingerprints reach into every corner of the web - you can't avoid them even if you're not signed in to a Google account. Google Analytics is everywhere as are the many Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). In fairness to Google, they do have an opt-out tool for Google Analytics. And many sites benefit from using Google's CDNs, although Google obviously benefits too).

What worries me is how easily Google avoids scrutiny on issues of user privacy and data collection, particuarly from the tech community who give them an easy ride on such matters.

it's quite creepy.

Curious what the negatives to Google Now are (aside from battery life, which seems to be a theme with Android)?

As deluded as it is, even honestly wishing for that betrays a smallness of character I find astonishing.

You know how in ancient times people who figured out how to predict an eclipse went on to play big boy with their oh so advanced, magic knowledge, and had that go to their head? We still live in those times.

I had to look that quote up to make sure you weren't kidding. Schmidt is a one-man anti-PR operation.

It's not all that useful if you don't have iOS or Android. They need a way to track your location + I think they scan your mail locally on the device instead of on the server (and they can't do this on desktop).