Google Now pushes itinerary and travel notifications, and Google Translate translates text in photos

Google recently released upgrades for two of its free products for Android devices: Google Translate and Google Now.

Google Now aims to automatically “surface” out of your calendars, apps, and personal records the information you need during the day without you having to summon it. Google Translate is an app that turns your smartphone camera into a translation tool.

Google Now

Google Now pinpoints information such as traffic conditions and sports updates based on a users’ past behavior with the device. Sports nuts who have a history of checking for updates from their favorite teams every morning may find that their phone now automatically opens a link to the relevant information at that time of day.

Google Now can also link with travel. Searching for a specific flight will add a card listing departure times and gate numbers to the travel section of your Google Now page.

If you take a particular flight often, then schedules may be automatically updated to what Google calls your “card,’ or a notification that’s an automated blurb, giving you the lowdown.

When you have a flight, Google Now checks traffic so you can know how long it’ll take to get to the airport. It also updates flight delays and traffic conditions to the airport for flights you’ve recently searched for.

Voice search will also bring up personalized answers to questions you ask, posting conventional search results below it.

Google Now takes advantage of your phone’s geo-location feature to automatically push locally relevant search results to the top of your search results.

As you walk down the street and pull out your phone to run a search, it will automatically suggest restaurants and places of interest — and often invite you to click make a reservation.

In another nifty trick, Google Now recognizes when you’re traveling away from home and pushes to you local conversion rate and the time back at your home city.

After figuring out your location, it can display a notification that tells a traveler how far they are from a hotel and how long it will take to get back in current traffic.

These and other search tricks bring Google onto the turf previously cornered by TripIt and Concur.

The app is available in the Google Play marketplace for users with the latest Android system, Jelly Bean, and there’s a hack for those who don’t have the latest system.

The notifications in Jelly Bean are now expandable, so let you take action right from the notification, but that functionality is missing for those with the older editions of Android.