Over the past year and a half or so Google has slowly built Google Now from a great voice searching service to a must-have app. Commands have expanded rapidly, and there are now dozens upon dozens of actions you can perform with Google Now on your Android 4.1 and up powered smartphone. For a while now though we were wondering if Google would expand Google Now’s reach to include your Chrome browser or your Chromebook, and had started seeing rumors as early as a whole year ago. As of just a few days ago we finally saw Google Now make its way to the Chrome browser on your PC, and now it’s officially available on your Chromebook running Chrome OS as well. If you’re interested in trying it out you’ll need to switch to the dev channel to get Chrome OS version 34.
With the release of Chrome OS version 34 Google is including Google Now in your notification center at the bottom right hand corner of your screen, but you’ll have to go through a few hoops to enable it until it becomes more “official.” Open up Chrome on any desktop OS, including Windows, Mac and of course Chrome OS and navigate to chrome://flags. Scroll down (or search) to Google Now and enable it. A quick restart of the browser enables Google Now in Chrome, and if you’re running Chrome OS you’ll receive Google Now cards in your notification center.
Unlike Google Now on your phone however, Google Now for Chrome OS won’t be giving you location-aware cards, at least not at the moment, but we expect Google will likely build some form of that into the service in the future. You’ll thankfully be given the rest of the cards available for your account, which is synced between all your devices using Google Play Services, so the reminders and such you make on your phone will appear on your Chromebook and vice-versa. Chrome OS version 34 is expected to roll out to everyone sometime in March or April, but being behind the hidden development flag not everyone will get these alerts until it’s made more of an obvious public option in a future release. For now enjoy the beta!
Via: The Next Web