latest
Long before Google Lens could be used to understand text and objects in photos you take, a feature called Now on Tap was introduced to analyze what was on your screen and bring you relevant search results relating to what it found. Of course, Google Now is no longer, and Now on Tap has morphed into a screen search function as part of the Google Assistant. It appears to be broken for some people at the moment, however.
Google Now on Tap was introduced alongside Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which used context on your screen to help you find information. Google Assistant replaced Now on Tap (for compatible devices), and carried over most of its functionality. Now Assistant is making it slightly more obvious that it can search your screen and take screenshots.
Google got in a habit of dumping all sorts of features and incomplete ideas into Google Now on Tap. With the move away from On Tap, Assistant focused more on voice control and connected services. However, some of the useful features of On Tap were left behind too. In the case of screenshots, it looks like Google is bringing it back in Assistant.
Read update
- Some users, including our own Artem, have reported that the Google app 6.6 update brings back the button. The update is currently in beta, so you will need to grab it from APKMirror or sign up for the beta program. After updating, it might take a few minutes for it to show up again. Google sure does work in mysterious ways.
Google Screen Search, formally known as Google Now on Tap, is a feature I don't use often - but it's incredibly helpful when I need it. If you're unfamiliar, it provides information to you based on the text on your screen, and works on any Android 6.0+ device with the Google app. For example, a few days ago I received a text message confirming an appointment, and Screen Search created a calendar event from the message contents.
Hi Google, it's me Rita. I believe we've met before. Somewhere between Gmail, Google Photos, and Chrome, you must know a lot about me. Things I might not want others to discover, so hushhhh. (There are thousands of people reading us, let's not tell them about my love for Winnie The Pooh.) But our relationship doesn't feel equal; I barely have any information about you. Your new guy, this Assistant you've sent here to talk to me, I'd like to get to know him better. He looks a lot like the other guys you've sent before, Now and On Tap, but he seems special. Smarter, more interesting, less coy, like a better analogue interface of what I imagine you to be.
One might assume that anyone who's enthusiastic enough to enable Google Now On Tap, the contextual search engine that uses screenshots and optical character recognition, would also want access to Google Now cards, which depend more on location, time, and search history. But you know what they say about making assumptions. Previously Now On Tap did indeed depend on the more vanilla Google Now, or at least was linked to it, but the latest version of the Google search app for Android seems to have reduced the interdependency of these two tools.
Google's Goggles is all but abandoned now. We've seen Google resurrect apps from the dead and update them after years of neglect, but it's hard to imagine the company putting a fresh coat of paint on Goggles at this point. If only because the app has been superseded by others from Google, with its functionality cut off into little pieces and moved to various places inside the ecosystem.
The Now On Tap portion of Google Search, still limited to Marshmallow and the Android N developer preview, is getting some new bells and whistles. A few readers tipped us off about the ability to select text in any app, activate the Now On Tap gesture, and get results only about the selected text. It's a great way to narrow the text recognition portion of the tool (which bowed earlier this year) down to only what you want. As we were preparing to report on the new feature, Google went ahead and announced it in a blog post, along with some other neat additions.
Dear international Android Police readers: thank you. Our staff is relatively small, so we can only be on the ground (so to speak) in a handful of countries... most of which are the US. So when a bunch of you from one particular place start telling us that something big is happening, we listen. The latest one is Google Now On Tap, the contextual screen-based search tool, which appears to be rolling out in Brazil right now. If you're in the country (and happen to be running Android M), give it a shot.
Google Now on Tap, the search engine's contextual tool for Android, hides some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve. But perhaps none is so handy to music lovers as this option, spotted by an Android Police reader: Now on Tap can serve up song lyrics directly from music apps with just a few on-screen taps. Google's Knowledge Graph system can already find lyrics fairly easily, but the way it's been integrated into the retrieval system for Android is fairly slick.
Read update
- This version also activates the previously discovered option to open links in Chrome Custom Tabs. Read about it here.
Google Now On Tap is one of those features that sounded great when it was announced, but has failed to live up to the hype now that it's out. It's not going to remain in that state forever, though. Google is already adding new features to On Tap, including some we've already noticed. A blog post on the Inside Search blog lays it all out.
You could say that Google Now on Tab has had an on-again-off-again relationship of sorts with the Android M developer preview. Back when version 5.3 of the Google app rolled out a few weeks ago, it enabled the functionality we saw detailed during Google I/O. If you tried to use Now on Tap a few days after that, it didn't work. Eventually you would see a pop up window saying, "Now on Tap is coming soon! Stay tuned..."
One of Google's big innovations in Android Marshmallow is Now On-Tap, a contextual search service that uses the content on your screen to perform searches and find relevant information. It's only going to work on Android 6.0, but Microsoft has just updated the Bing app with a similar feature called Snapshots that will work on any device.