A range of startups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search - new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting or where it was.
How does the phone know? Because an application has read your email, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.
The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require people to enter a search query. Your context - location, time of day and digital activity - is the query, say the engineers who build these services.
Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, Google Now is an important part of Google's Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.
Google Now is "kind of blowing my mind right now," said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. "I mean, I'm pretty jaded, right? I've seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven't. Google Now is doing that."
But for some people, predictive search - also in services like Cue, reQall, Donna, Tempo AI, MindMeld and Evernote - is the latest intrusion into our lives, another disruption pinging and buzzing in our pockets, mining our digital lives for personal information and straddling the line between helpful and creepy.
"To the question of creepiness, the answer is it depends who you ask," said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the legal implications of technology. "What works for a group of 30-something engineers in Silicon Valley may not be representative of the way that 60-year-old executives in New York tend to use their phones."
Many software programmers have dreamed of building a tool like this for years. The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it.
"We can't go on with eight meetings and 200 emails a day," said N. Rao Machiraju, co-founder and chief executive of reQall, which sells its technology to other companies to make their own personal assistant apps. "We have a technology that isn't waiting for you to ask it a question but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that."
The services guess what you want to know based on the digital breadcrumbs you leave, like calendar entries, emails, social network activity and the places you take your phone. Many use outside services for things like coupons, news and traffic.
Google Now, which came to some Android phones a year ago and iPhones in April, tells you when it is time to leave for a dinner reservation. That is because it noticed an OpenTable email in your Gmail inbox, knows your location from your phone's GPS and checked Google Maps for traffic conditions.
How does the phone know? Because an application has read your email, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.
The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require people to enter a search query. Your context - location, time of day and digital activity - is the query, say the engineers who build these services.
Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, Google Now is an important part of Google's Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.
Google Now is "kind of blowing my mind right now," said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. "I mean, I'm pretty jaded, right? I've seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven't. Google Now is doing that."
But for some people, predictive search - also in services like Cue, reQall, Donna, Tempo AI, MindMeld and Evernote - is the latest intrusion into our lives, another disruption pinging and buzzing in our pockets, mining our digital lives for personal information and straddling the line between helpful and creepy.
"To the question of creepiness, the answer is it depends who you ask," said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the legal implications of technology. "What works for a group of 30-something engineers in Silicon Valley may not be representative of the way that 60-year-old executives in New York tend to use their phones."
Many software programmers have dreamed of building a tool like this for years. The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it.
"We can't go on with eight meetings and 200 emails a day," said N. Rao Machiraju, co-founder and chief executive of reQall, which sells its technology to other companies to make their own personal assistant apps. "We have a technology that isn't waiting for you to ask it a question but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that."
The services guess what you want to know based on the digital breadcrumbs you leave, like calendar entries, emails, social network activity and the places you take your phone. Many use outside services for things like coupons, news and traffic.
Google Now, which came to some Android phones a year ago and iPhones in April, tells you when it is time to leave for a dinner reservation. That is because it noticed an OpenTable email in your Gmail inbox, knows your location from your phone's GPS and checked Google Maps for traffic conditions.
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