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You’re excited to get to the stadium for the ball game or to the theater for the play, so the last thing on your mind just might be, “Where in the world did I park my car?”
It’s probably happened to everyone at least once, and though it can be embarrassing, eventually you just wait until the parking lot thins out to find your car, or its location finally comes to you in a rush of information in your mind.
Well, now Google Now can give you help, too.
Google has added a nifty feature in Google Now that helps you remember where you left your wheels parked in the first place. The new “parking location” feature, which can provide an approximate location of your vehicle, was unveiled by Google recently in an update of Google Now.
The parking location card will show up in your Google Now feed on your mobile device if driving is the main mode of transportation that you have selected in Google Now.
“When the card shows up in Google Now, you’ll see an indicator showing the approximate location of your car,” according to Google. “To see other locations where you’ve recently parked, touch ‘Previous locations.’ Your location data for parking location cards isn’t shared with anyone else.”
The parking location card in Google Now uses your device’s sensors to know when you leave a moving vehicle, according to Google. That means that users may also see a parking location card even if they didn’t drive or park their own car. “For example, these cards could show up after you exit a bus or a friend’s car,” according to Google.
Users can customize their parking location cards when they appear by touching the Menu icon on the card and then answering the questions that appear. To turn the parking location cards off, users can touch the Menu icon on the card, then select “no” when they are asked if they want to keep receiving reminders about their parking location.
Google Now, which was introduced for Android devices by Google in June 2012, presents its information through a series of flip-through “cards” that are visible on the screen of a device, providing a different piece of information on each card. The “cards” appear at the moment they are needed by users, such as the train schedule card appearing when a user is heading to the local train station. Google Now service for iOS arrived in April 2013 as part of a new Google Search app so that users of iPhones and iPads could benefit from its notifications.