Head of Google Now talks about the development of the project

Aparna Chennapragada has been with Google for six years. Since 2012, she has been the head of the Google Now project, which was launched as a personal assistant in the Google search application. Speaking about her project in an interview with RBC magazine, she stresses that Google Now differs from traditional Internet search primarily because it can not only provide information on the entered question, but also predict the question itself. That is, here Google is learning to offer answers to requests that have not yet been entered.

As an example of successful use of the search, Aparna offers the following situations: a person is in a shopping center and would probably like to receive his plan, and Google Now offers the user a plan of a shopping center, assessing its location at the moment; if someone came to Disneyland, it is obvious that the person will be interested in attractions, based on this assumption, Google Now can find and offer relevant information.

Another key difference with Google Now is that it not only displays links to pages with an answer to a question, but also provides an answer. That is, according to Aparna, if a user makes a request for traffic at a given time on a specific territory, then the system should understand that he is actually interested in the time during which he can get, for example, from work home, and give him this data .
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Also, the head of Google Now said that the context of using the service at a certain point is the most important thing. The service is already able to take into account many factors in order to give the user the most relevant information. The personal interests of users and their location, as well as other things reflected in the network are taken into account.

One of the interests of the project is to facilitate the movement of users in cities. The difficulty lies in the fact that the infrastructure of different cities is different, and if in some places people move by car, in others they prefer public transport. And so the system must understand the differences. The project team is working to ensure that the search shows users important and necessary information.

Aparna also noted that voice search technologies have made a huge step forward over the past three years. According to a study conducted by Google last year, people began to use voice search twice as often, especially teens like it.

Aparna says that now the company is focused on ensuring that the product is really useful for users, so that they return to it again and again. Larry Page called a kind of verification of the success of a product with people “toothbrush test”: if a product is used at least twice a day, then it has the right to life.