Towards the end of last month, Google announced some new features for its Snapshot Assistant interface which bring it closer to what we always hoped Google Now would become. Among the new capabilities was a birthday reminder, said to be coming soon to English-speaking markets along with a notification so that you can't miss it. These appear to be functional now, so keep an eye out for them.

A few tipsters have reported seeing the new notification in their shade (see below), as early as last month. They seem to surface around a week and a half before the birthday in question, giving you plenty of time to plan something special and no excuse for forgetting.

The two actions are the usual 'Useful' or 'Not useful' options so you can tell the Assistant you want or don't want these in future, while opening it up takes you to the Snapshot page in the Assistant. These notifications will only appear if you have a birthday set against contacts saved to Google, so time to go in and add them for the most important ones. Maybe I'll abandon my antiquated tactic of just adding them to my calendar.

Thanks: Nick Cipriani, Anthony Maki, Samarth Verma