watch4now

en Apple first introduced Siri with the iPhone 4S, it was not the first time the world had seen voice control, but it did mark the first time a major company was releasing it to the world simultaneously on millions of mobile devices as their most prominent feature.

Despite its innumerable flaws and barely finished nature, Siri brought voice recognition to such prominence that soon companies big and small were scrambling to integrate it into all sorts of products.

Google’s take on the virtual personal assistant was called Google Now, and it was launched on July 9, 2012 as a part of the Android 4.1 (“Jelly Bean”) update. In many ways better than Siri, Google Now tries to pre-empt what the user wants based on their search habits and email history and tries to offer it before being asked to do so.

However, there are some areas where Google Now falls short of the target set by Siri, and others still where both Google Now and Siri could stand to learn from smaller challengers.

In my quest to improve the voice recognition features of Android, I have tried a majority of (if not all) the third-party virtual assistants available on the Play Store. Mostly free, these competitors try to best Google’s efforts in their own unique ways, but they all tend to fall short of the task. In this article, I’ll discuss in depth the only third-party app I’ve found for Android that actually works alongside Google Now instead of trying to replace it, and complements its features with many of its own.

Note: This is a hands-on article that goes into details about precisely which settings you need to change on your device to arrive at an optimal configuration. I therefore recommend that you follow along on your Android device as you read this guide.

Before we download the third-party app, let’s go over a few settings for Google Now that make the voice control experience better on Android.

Launch Google Now on your phone and tap on the Menu button in the bottom-right corner of the screen (you may have to scroll down to get to it). Make sure Google Now is turned on and then tap on the Voice option. The main thing I want you to do here is go into the “Offline speech recognition” settings and ensure that your language is installed (if it is supported).

Go back to the main settings screen and select “Accounts & privacy”. Here, I prefer to keep “Google location settings” turned on, with both the Location History and Location Reporting features enabled. Web History is also checked.

Most importantly, make sure that you turn on the “Contact recognition” feature if you’d like to use Google Now to be able to call and text your contacts using voice instructions. Also ensure that the “Show updates from Google Now” feature is enabled under Notifications, if you’d like to use its excellent Reminders feature.

Voice recognition is only one of the two important parts of a virtual assistant; the other is text-to-speech. You need your voice assistant to sound human, and there’s some setup involved in getting there. Go into the Settings app on your phone and navigate to ‘Language & input » Text-to-speech output’. Tap on the Settings button next to “Google Text-to-speech engine” and then on “Install voice data”. Select your language and download the “high quality” voice for it if it is available. That done, you’re all set to proceed.

You can now use Google Now to do a host of things: perform web searches, ask general knowledge questions, perform translations, create alarms, events and reminders, call and text contacts, find out the weather, look up addresses and get directions, perform conversions and calculations, get sports updates, check your flight status, open web URLs and listen to music, among other things. For the voice control enthusiast, it truly is one of the greatest features of Android.