When Google launched Keep for Android and the web a few months ago, it was essentially a basic note-taking application. Today, the company is launching a major update that turns it into a far more useful application. The update, which will start rolling out today, is centered around the new “Remind me” button, which now lets you schedule time-based reminders and location-based alerts that hook into Google Now.
When you walk into a grocery store now (and your grocery list is tagged with the store’s location), you will get a Google Now alert to remind you of all the milk and cereal you have to buy. To make this easier, Keep now also auto-completes nearby places.
As Google notes, you can obviously snooze any of these reminders and choose a time or place “that’s better for you.”
With this update, Google is also bringing a new navigation drawer to the app that lets you quickly switch between different accounts (great if you have a home and work to-do list, for example) and allows you to see all your upcoming reminders in one place.
Also new in this update is the ability to quickly add existing photos from your Android phone to Keep.
Google Now is quickly evolving to become Google’s main hub for alerts of all kinds and today’s Keep integration is yet another sign that the company continues to push Now’s feature set forward. Field Trip, which launched on Google Glass today, would be another natural candidate for Google Now integration, but for the time being, it’s still a separate product (as many of Google’s Niantic Labs experiments are).
