Google Assistant is looking forward to a major update that will help you to store and remember almost any piece of information, and then find it later.
According to Google 9to5, the enhanced Memory feature will be a combination of to-do list, scratch book, reading list and digital archive with which you can save anything for easy retrieval. It is reported that it has already been confirmed within Google – although so far there is no word on when it will be released.
Although Google Assistant already has a Memory feature, it’s very limited at the moment: you can verbally tell the Assistant to remember things for you, then ask him to remember you later.
The new version feels much more powerful, with 9to5Google claiming that it can save a lot of content, including “articles, books, notifications, events, flights, hotels, images, movies, music, notes, photos, locations, playlists, products, recipes, souvenirs, restaurants, screenshots, loads, TV shows, videos and websites. ”
The site has taken a selection of screenshots from the new Memory feature, and they give you an interesting insight into the kinds of things that will be possible.
Once you’ve stored something, it will appear in a new Memory feed inside Assistant, along with the existing Snapshot feature. This is sorted by chronological order, although Google will have card entries for both “Old Memories” and “Today”.
And like the recent changes to Google Photos, which saw an improved space for Lens visual inspection feature, Memory also delivers contextually relevant content along with what you save. So if you save flight information, for example, it may show adjacent flight status, while a movie listing could be shown by its trailer.
There will also be a new way to store things to Memory: in addition to asking your fan verbally, you’ll be able to use home screen shortcuts, making it easy to view things you’re looking at add the screen. Tags can also be saved by labels, so that they can be found later.
We don’t know when Memory will launch (assuming it passes an internal Google test), but it looks like a major update. Here’s hoping it gets too far.