Assistant Memory can be the future of Google collections and allow you to save what you want for later

Google appears to be internally testing something called Memory, which will be inside the Google Assistant and the search application. It appears to be a ‘dogfood feature’ early in development and wants to allow you to capture just about anything and ask the Wizard to retrieve it for you later using voice commands. There is also an interface that allows you to organize and search for memories at will and 9to5Google was able to take several screenshots of them. We’ll put some down below, but be sure to check out the rest of them with Abner Li later. Here is a list of all the memories you can capture with the Wizard:

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Before, you could ask Google Assistant to remember your favorite color, birthday and other basic information. When you ask to say what the answers to these questions are, the Assistant dives into your hidden memory and presents the answer you gave earlier. ‘Assistant Memory’ as a service seems to be overloading that cute little feature and turning it into an affordable powerhouse that you can use directly and I have to admit – this is really cool.

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If all of this already seems familiar to you, it’s because we’ve covered many of these features multiple times when we’re talking about Google’s top secret collections feature. I don’t think it’s a secret now. Not only that, but it seems that it is still very important for Google and is turning into something a little more automated and intelligent. The collections are fantastic, but there is still a lot of manual work involved – it looks more like an alternative to Pinterest than anything else. Linking the ability to collect things that are valuable to you to the Assistant and “Getting Google to do this”, so to speak, may be just what content curation needs right now!

There is a ‘Topics’ section, as you can see in the screenshot above, that allows ‘Create topic’, and that gives me a serious impression of ‘New Collection’ – it still features the Google Collections favorite icon that I continue to pointing out virtually all Google services recently. As it allows you to collect much of the same web content that you can with Collections, I believe that one day Memory will completely replace it.

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If that means that Google Collections is in fact following the dodo’s path, I won’t be upset. As enthusiastic as I am with them – as I have said many times and get attached – it is natural for these things to take on new forms. It is as I always say – Google is a company in constant evolution, with ideas in constant evolution and those who most like their products are the ones who can deal with this fact. We continually see this shift in its services, more and more towards AI and machine learning, so this really isn’t a big surprise. What is important to me is that the idea of ​​collecting things is the future and is being preserved. Not only that, but the idea of ​​’scorecards’ is still going through a facelift, so it’s a win-win situation for me!

The fact that Memory also allows you to capture many of the real world things in the list above makes me think that it will directly use Google Lens, which was recently placed in the Google search bar on Android and has been given a new icon. Coincidence? I think not! If you capture things from a digital source, say a website or document, the Assistant will apparently preserve its context and source as part of the memory card.

There will be special cards for items like Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings, Forms, Sites, Jamboards and more, and all of your memories will be presented to you in a Google Discover style feed. On the bottom shelf of the memory feed, there is a snapshot icon, so I’m led to believe that Google will want you to check your memories every day as part of – or in addition to – your snapshot. The latter already shows many things about your day, including the upcoming Calendar events, Tasks and more from the Assistant, so I can also see the company combining this one day.

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Depending on the type of “memory card” and the information (I think our brains need memory cards now? Let’s start the Android revolution!), The Wizard will show you the contextual options related to it. Let’s say, for example, that you have a flight arriving and it is preserved on a memory card – which I assume will be ‘automatically’ obtained from Gmail as the Assistant already does – you will be able to see options for checking the flight status. If it is a package shipment, you will see an option to track it. If it’s a movie or TV show, you’ll be able to see the option to watch a trailer for it, and so on. All this automation makes me drool a little – it’s fantastic!

You will also see in the screenshot provided that there is a ‘Read later’ option. If Google intends to link articles from Google Discover, Google News or the Chrome Reading List feature (hopefully all three!), That could mean that many of the features we’ve followed over the past year may be closer than ever before, and it was about time. For more evidence of this, Google is working to allow you to collect your Chrome Guide Groups from your Reading List for later retrieval.

There’s also a new Chrome memories feature on Chromebooks that we’re looking at. The memories on the web previously took us to a broken page, but now, when visiting chrome: // memories, we are presented with some text in the middle of the screen that says ‘based on previous activity on the web’. We already have chrome: // history and Google Activity to track web activity, so why is a memory section needed?

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It sounds crazy, but listen to me for a moment – what if Google intends to use chrome: // memories to allow you to access your Assistant Memory (perhaps the future of Google collections?) Directly from your desktop browser or Chromebook? What if the Assistant Memory also includes items from the Chrome Reading List? If your Reading List is becoming the new home page for the collected Guide Groups, does this also mean that your Guide Groups will exist in your memory and be accessible in a new tab similar to Toby, the guide manager?

There seems to be some evidence of chrome: // memories intending users to access their tab groups, and as it shares a name very similar to Google Assistant Memory, is this a coincidence? I personally don’t think so, and neither does Dinsan from Chrome Story.

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The only progress I was able to make was to find this hashtag in the Chromium code. Within some other code change requests for the memories feature, I found mentions of browser history and groups of tabs.

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If everything you do online is tracked in your Google activity, and many of these things are available in your Google memory, does that mean that your activity can also one day be grouped with memory? I know I’m jumping around a little bit here and the latter can be a little forced, but I’m a futurist and I’m excited! Keep in mind that Google Activity tracks your activity across all of your devices, not just a laptop.

Imagine, for a moment, using Google’s products and services, but they really provide a more cohesive experience than ever. I know, I can’t imagine it either. Google has come a long way over the years, but I would be lying if I said that many of its services were super ‘well done’ before launch. We’ve been waiting for years for the ability to add articles to a Reading List and access them on multiple devices, among other things, so that they finally find a way to bring together everything that’s important to us to humanize data and make it more personal, so I’m 100% on board and can’t wait to try it out. Let’s just hope he isn’t canned like our beloved Kaleidoscope – fingers crossed.