Google Now is about to arrive in Chrome beta for Mac, Windows and Chromebook. With this, Google’s automatic alerts for upcoming concerts you bought tickets to, flight delays, heavy traffic on your route to work and other relevant information the company gleans from your daily habits and emails, have now finally found their way onto the desktop. The company says this new feature will be available later this week, so if you don’t see it yet, don’t despair.
Google Now launched on Android and then, after a long delay, found its way on iOS. While there had long been sightings of Google Now code in Chrome, it took Google quite a while to bring this feature to the desktop.
For the time being, this new feature is only available on Chrome beta, the most stable of Chrome’s preview channels, and in English. Google promises it will support other languages soon.
The notifications will show cards for weather, sports scores, commute traffic, shipping notifications and event reminders.
Google notes that some of this info may be based on where your mobile device is and that the desktop version only shows a subset of the notifications that are available on mobile. Given that you are probably not looking for tourist attractions around your desktop or in need of translation and currency conversion services, this restrictions makes sense.
Now that this feature in the beta channel, it’s only a matter of time before every Chrome users will get access to it. If this release in the beta channels works out well, chances are it will graduate to the stable release pretty soon.