Announced on the Official Google Search blog earlier today, the Google Now team has announced additional third party support for cards within Google Now. Specifically, 70 new third-party apps have been added to the system including media apps like Spotify, TuneIn and YouTube, food-related apps like OpenTable, Eat24 and Allrecipes, fitness apps from Adidas, RunKeeper and Jawbone, news information apps like ABC News and Feedly as well as travel-related apps like Kayak and ZipCar.
If interested in adding any of these new cards to Google Now, you can find the full list of working apps here. These apps are specifically designed to be predictive, basically attempt to supply users with information at the right time. For instance, the OpenTable app could display information about the cost of the check when a restaurant meal comes to a close. Through the card interface, you can launch directly into payment and leave the restaurant after paying for the check using your smartphone.
Other examples of these types of notifications could be reminders when your ZipCar reservation is about to end, alerts from RunKeeper reminding you to exercise to burn off the calories from your heavy lunch or perhaps Spotify offering playlist suggestions based off your recent music listening history. Of course, all the apps have to specifically be authorized by the smartphone owner and permission has to be given in order to appear in the Google Now interface.
At this time, Google Now integration is still being tested privately with a select group of third-party developers. Google is expected to open up the Google Now interface to all developers, but hasn’t announced a date in which that access will be granted. For the time being, it appears that Google will continue rolling out third-party support on Google Now with select batches of apps.