Google Now is one of the key features that Jelly Bean brought to the table. In a lot of ways, it was Google’s answer to that other voice assistant, Siri. However, it acts and functions quite differently from Siri. Rather than having the ability to have a conversation with your phone (which for some is creepy while for others is wonderful) Google Now learns your behaviour and aims to make your more productive. It will, of course, give you some basic information such as weather and stocks and even your favourite sports teams scores, but it can also pull flight information from your Gmail account or estimate how far you are from meetings or work or dinner spots before you even ask it.
One limitation of Google Now though is that you have to jump into the search app in order to check out your Google Now cards. While this isn’t a huge hindrance, it is an extra step that needs to be taken to take a glance at what’s going on in your world. Well it appears that may be changing as a widget could be on the way.
This new news comes directly from one of the Google support pages, which adds a lot of credibility to the story. The page has since been pulled down which tells us that this new widget is likely still getting some fine tuning but I can’t see it being too far off. In addition to the traditional placement of the widget on the home page, it is highly likely that this widget will be usable as one of the lock screen widgets as well, something that came along in Android 4.2.
We’ll be sure to keep you posted with future developments!