Google’s digital assistant for Android, Google Now, might not have been given a proper human-sounding name — but in terms of intimacy it could soon be graduating to another level. Google Now is already at the very least an adequate app that can pull up information for you on demand, such as flight times, can buy movie tickets and find Italian restaurants in a given area, to name a few capabilities. Right now it seems Google is thinking about having its digital assistant pay a little more attention to your wants and needs.

Google appears to be working on personalizing Google Now more as the image below from Android Police shows.

The new feature, called Explore Interests, will allow you to add interests and Google will then track that category for you. The interests in the screenshot are very wide, such as “sports”, which of course could be updated 500 times per minute. But it seems you can choose your interests within interests, so by choosing, say, Belinda Carlisle under musicians, you might be able to keep a pretty thorough tab on the singer. You will receive a notification in ‘People’, hit that tab, and it will reveal that the Belinda Carlisle tab is active. That’s what it looks like, anyway.

This wouldn’t be a bad feature at all, especially for anyone tracking businesses, politics, events, etc. If you’re a tech blogger for instance and your beat is Google, then Google Now’s Explore Interests would come in very handy. There are other ways to track information of course, but this feature looks fairly useful.

Right now no one is sure exactly how this will work, and Google has been taciturn about the matter only saying that the Explore Interests is an “experiment”. It’s likely that Google Now will not wait for you to input your interests into categories, but understand what you want via your search history, movements and activities. For anyone who travels a lot from one city to another, or often takes weekend breaks, it might be good to be informed every time a major deal is offered by an airline or a hotel.

At Google I/O, the company’s developers conference, Google announced Google Assistant, what CEO Sundar Pichai dubbed as the Google for you, an “individual Google’. What users want from their assistants is relative information that saves them time or money, not an overwhelming amount of unwanted information or targeted adds. The more personal the assistant becomes, the better we’ll feel about allowing it to become a part of our lives.

Photo credit: See-ming Lee via Flickr