If you’ve been following the rise and roll out of Google’s intelligent personal assistant, you’ll be happy to know that Now has gone beyond mobile. Yes, you can now get reminders for everything from your upcoming flight to the restaurant reservation you made last week on your desktop. Well, if you use Chrome.
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While there have been hints that Now was headed to the popular web browser for a while, Google announced that it would finally launch the service to Beta users this week. In a blog post, software engineer Travis Skare explained that users of Chrome Beta, who are signed into Chrome with the same account they use Google Now with on their mobile devices, will begin receiving notifications and be able to see Now cards inside their browser.
“So the next time you’re finishing up emails at your desk, Google Now might suggest that you leave the office a bit early to beat the heavy traffic on the way to your dinner date,” Skare writes. “To view the notifications, click on the bell icon on your desktop (on Mac and Windows) or the numbered box (on Chromebook) to open the Chrome notification centre.”
While Now will be available for English-speaking Beta users in the upcoming days, it’s unclear as to when Google will roll out the service to general Chrome users in different languages. But users of Chrome Beta receive and test new Google products before the tech giant pushes them out to the wider public, which means that Now could soon be headed to the world’s most popular browser after some feedback and tweaks.
Until now, the service has only been available for Android and iPhone users (and no, there’s no word on a Windows Phone or BlackBerry release date).
