Google Finally Begins Advertising Now on Tap

Google’s Now on Tap was first unveiled back during Google I/O in 2015, and although it’s still only available on a small percentage of devices, given that you need Marshmallow for it to be compatible, it opens up the potential for Google now to be much more useful than without the Now on Tap feature, as users are essentially able to use Google Now to grab relevant information about whatever was on screen. Having been nearly a year since the announcement and since Google started pushing Marshmallow to devices and flipping the switch to enable the Now on Tap feature, one might have expected Google to advertise the functionality at some point much earlier than now, as the next Google I/O is already within sight, coming up next week.

This isn’t the case, though, as Google recently posted their very first ad for Google Now on Tap and it can be seen in the video below. What makes this odd is that Google could have begun spreading the word on this new feature a lot easier had they started much earlier, say, maybe within a week or two after the announcement last year. Google chose to wait though and is just now rolling out an ad for the Marshmallow and forward function.

Whatever Google’s reasons for waiting, the advertisement paints a clear picture of what Now on Tap is supposed to provide to the user. The example used in the video references finding out about a place to eat that’s recommended in a text by a friend, allowing the recipient to forego having to search for the restaurant, instead being able to press the Google Now button and bring up any relevant information in a snap like the map of its location and the address and phone number, even allowing the option to easily add an event date into the calendar. While it would be easy to look into this and think that Google may have posted this video so close to Google I/O this year because they may be planning to talk about it some more at the conference, there is no evidence of that, of course, and is purely a thought on the whole scenario. Marshmallow is starting to make its way to more and more devices, so now may have been just as good of a time as any for Google to start highlighting the ease of use for Now on Tap, which just recently gained photo recognition features back in March of this year.