Heads up for those of you with a device running Android 6.0 Marshmallow: The Now on Tap feature is about to get a whole lot smarter.
For the uninitiated, Now on Tap offers up potentially useful information about what's on your screen, wherever you are, when you touch and hold your device's home button. With today's update, you can select the exact word or phrase you need help with, and also get information about images or photos.
As Google Vice President of Android Product Management Brian Rakowski explained last year when the feature made its debut, Now on Tap "stays on task alongside you, instantly pulling up relevant info and helping you get more done." Say, for instance, you receive an email from a friend asking if you want to go to the zoo. Just tap and hold the home button, and Now on Tap will offer up links to relevant information about the zoo, shortcuts to relevant apps, and can even create a calendar event for you.
Until now, however, if you used Now on Tap in an email, app, chat, or news article with a lot of text, you'd sometimes get results for things you didn't need. Google is looking to change that with this update.
Now, if you're reading a news article, you can select a specific word you're curious about, and Google will spit back a definition and links to relevant apps. Meanwhile, if you're browsing images on your device and want more information about a particular snap, just touch and hold the home button. This feature works across all your apps — from Pinterest to Google Photos, or anywhere you see an image.
This feature also lets you search for certain images or objects via your camera app in real time. If, for instance, you're standing in front of the Bay Bridge, just hold up your phone, open your camera app, then touch and hold the home button. This feature is still pretty limited, but should work with other famous structures as well as movie posters and magazines.
At this point, Now on Tap only offers definitions in English, but Google said it plans to roll out other languages "over the coming weeks."