Google Now and its Indian predictions

I've been tracking Google Now for a while. However, Google did not push most of the features in India, though they have been rolling out incremental capabilities in US and few other geographies over the past years. 

In the past few months I was excited to see Google Now cards being gradually pushed onto my android mobile. I've been checking the cards, customizing preferences and feeding inputs based on the suggestions it had been surfacing. For instance, there are cards for weather alert, stock movements and news story suggestions based on browsing history. Few weeks back, I was glad to notice stories suggested from my Feedly account, based on Google Now's integration with the Feedly app. 

Couple of days back, I was amazed to see Google Now push a travel card, alerting me to leave for the office at 9.10 AM. I later figured that this was based on a meeting in my calendar that was setup at my office; this was combined with my home location, and by figuring out the possible routes and travel times, Google noticed a surge in traffic on that day. Per its calculations, the usual 30 minute journey was supposed to take 50 minutes, and hence it prompted me to leave immediately. 

Amazed with this alacrity, I left home a bit earlier and indeed found the traffic to be excessively bad that day. I duly checked back with Google on the best route for the day, and it showed me a off-road route, under the Hafeezpet railway bridge as the shortest one, while my usual route was projected to take 40 minutes longer than usual. Grateful to Google, I took up this route which was something I used to take very occasionally. True to the predictions, I encountered very less traffic on the route, inspite of all other roads being clogged.

With everything going picture perfect right from the start & in a dreamy state, I was woken up with a rude shock when I saw that the underpass road was filled with water upto 3 feet, from the previous day's heavy rains! That was perhaps the reason for less traffic on this particular route. Taking a U-turn, I went back to my usual route, and spent an hour longer commuting to the office. I had the Google assistant turned off for the rest of journey.

The Indian market is indeed unique and a tough one to crack! Hope the Now Cards algorithms learn its peculiarities soon enough to get accustomed to this market.