feature request

[cellio]

My phone knows where I am because of GPS.

It knows where I've been because surely it logs stuff like that. And yeah that's creepy, but still.

It spontaneously offers me information I haven't yet asked for, often correctly. Last week, for example, I had to travel for business, and starting a day or so before my flight it gave me weather information for my destination alongside my local weather. (I don't know whether it scraped that information out of email or got it from the airline app.)

So... could my phone please alert me, as I'm leaving for work, about traffic problems on my usual route? Please? It knows, after all; were I to check the navigator I'd see the problem. And it knows where I am, and that I follow that particular route every (week)day. It knows I am not in the habit of checking for traffic alerts. (It probably doesn't know that that's because I'm not at my best in the morning, but give it time.) So a little just-in-time information here would be great.

Google, can you take care of that? Thanks.

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

I think Google Now is supposed to do this (if you have the location history and all that turned on).

Oh, you know what it was that I've seen, it's a "you'd better start driving now to get to your event, because of unusual traffic" notification. So I think if you tell the calendar an event representing your workday, then this might come up? And, uh, I guess an event representing "go home" to get that direction -- this is getting kludgy. What you describe would make a lot of sense if it's not already in there somewhere.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Actually, I do have a "Go Home" reminder on my phone, but I don't think that's necessary for what cellio has in mind.

[cellio]

I've gotten a few "time to leave for X" notices since installing Google Now. (One of them told me it was time to leave for the airport when I was already almost there, so not perfect, but not bad either.) I don't know if these alerts took traffic into account.

this is getting kludgy

Yeah. It seems like the phone already has all the data available to be able to offer me this information, so I'd like it to just do so without me having to kludge something together.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Those times do reflect traffic, yep. (That was an exciting load increase on our system when Now launched.)

Thinking about this, there are a couple of variants, depending on whether the user needs to be at work/home on time, or has some amount of time flexibility, or has multiple route options.
a) alert "time to leave for work" every day when it's coming up time to leave; have this reflect travel time in traffic.
b) alert "time to leave for work" only on days where you have to leave N minutes earlier than usual.
c) alert "take this variant route to work" only when the best route changes from the usual.
(where these are not actually mutually exclusive, you could have two active.)

Who knows, maybe some of these are possible but the magic hasn't triggered for me. It doesn't understand my commute routes well at all, so it has no chance at this point to do C for me, which I'd love.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's an obvious thing for it to do, and (as an employee of Google Maps) I'm surprised that it doesn't. What app(s) are you using?

Google Now tells me a lot of things like that, some of them with push notifications and some only when I explicitly open it. (And yes, it scrapes airline information from recent e-mails, and gives me reminders and status updates about them.) I'll ask around.

[cellio]

I completely forgot that you were on the maps team when I posted this. (Google I knew, but the detail had slipped my mind.)

Google Now gives me different mixes of info (when I open the search widget) and I'm not sure what drives it. It always tells me weather and suggests a few links to read. Sometimes it tells me about nearby restaurants. Sometimes it tells me about TV shows it thinks I would like. (Err, since it doesn't talk to my TiVo, I guess it's getting that from my Netflix email plus occasional searches?) Sometimes it tells me what buses are due at the nearest stop. And sometimes it tells me how long it would take to get to work (it seems to know about work) if I left now. And sometimes when I'm at work it tells me about nearby parking. But on any given use of the app I have no idea what of that I'm going to get.

So sometimes it offers me (via a little map snippet, plus text) commuting information, but not a lot and I haven't noticed if it's traffic-sensitive. If it can do that, it'd sure be nice if it gave an alert when its estimate of travel time is higher than usual, or if it could directly tell me "hey, heavy traffic on I-376", or whatever. There are a couple different routes I can take to work, the preferred one and the fallback; knowing I should take the fallback before I've committed to the preferred one would be great.

Thanks for asking around!