Google Now on Tap was announced at Google IO 2015, at the time to much excitement. Jump forward to today and it turns out that while exciting, the feature didn’t turn out to be as useful as it was exciting. Google’s hoping to fix that by adding some new functionality.
Highlight text
This is one of those “why wasn’t it already in there” features. For screens that contain a lot of text, you can now highlight just the text you want extra information about. To active simply highlight the text and hold on the home button and now on tap will launch with results just for the highlighted words.
Image search
How about getting more information about an image? Want to identify the make of a car? Or what kind of tree you’re looking at? Now on Tap will scan images on your screen and perform a Google image search.
I tried this with mixed results, so it will be interested to see how useful this ends up being.
Camera Search
Imagine your standing in front of a famous monument but you don’t know its name. How are you going to find out more information about it? Easy, load up your camera, frame it, hold the home button and Now on Tap will scan your screen and return results, just as if it was an image search.
These updates are rolling out everywhere Now on Tap is available.
Do you think these new features will make you use Now on Tap more often? Let us know what you think Now on Tap should add.
Wow, awesome updates. I can see this becoming super powerful and useful!!
Is this a server side roll out? The features certainly aren’t working for me yet. Though I do like the idea of Now on Tap as opposed to the reality of it right now. These features will certainly help make it a bit better for me.
Seems to be, working for me with out and update.
They all seem like the “why wasn’t it already in there” type of updates, doesn’t really affect my interest (or lack there of) in Now On Tap
i think i’m one of the few now on tap apologists out there, i still think it’s super cool and find it very useful (when i can remember to use it).
weirdest part for me: when you use it on a band/song title it brings up spotify links but not google play music ones. super weird oversight there.
I think it’s cool too
Nice updates. My issue with Now on Tap is in general, my life isn’t interesting enough to need to use it! 😉 When I have used it, normally it works pretty well. I also wonder and wondered before IO, if there wasn’t a way to almost have a mode like, dare I say it, Clippy where it sees things that it might be able to help with and light up the home button or something. At IO, having the Google Assistant (which is basically V2 of Google Now/On Tap) in Allo and picking up on things in conversation hopefully will… Read more »