Google Now Comes to the Desktop in Chrome Canary for Windows and Mac

As the text on the infamous Ron Paul animation proclaims, it’s happening. (I just preempted you, commenters, so there’s really no need to post that GIF.) Since the debut of Google Now with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, users have been clamoring for a desktop extension of the service. It took a year and a half, but Google Now has finally come to Windows and Mac users as an experimental feature in the Canary version of Chrome.

Using the location of your Android device(s), information such as traffic and commute times, weather, upcoming events, and sports scores will periodically display in Chrome’s Notification Center on desktop (in the menu bar on OS X and the system tray in Windows). The current implementation is fairly basic, but will assuredly improve as it inches towards general release.

Chrome Canary is generally unstable, but if you wish to install it and try out the desktop Google Now for yourself, remember to navigate to chrome://flags/#enable-google-now and enable the setting. You may also need to toggle the flags for rich notifications, sync notifications, and experimental UI for notifications, but I personally didn’t need to.

Via: Google Support