Google Gets a Whole Lot Better at Detecting Delayed Flights

Google is introducing some serious improvements to its flight tracking system. The company introduced the ability to know if your flight might get delayed with 85% accuracy earlier this year.

That feature is getting a whole lot more useful, though. You can now ask Google Assistant if a certain flight has the possibility of getting delayed, and Google will give you an answer. You can ask it for things like “Hey Google, is my flight on time?” or things like “Hey Google, what’s the status of the American Airlines flight from Denver to New York?”

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Google will also provide some reasoning behind its prediction when possible, which I think is kind of cool. Assistant will also deliver notifications for flights that you are following, or your own flights which is also very useful.

The company is making other changes elsewhere, like on Google Maps where planning vacation is getting much easier with new features like “things to do” that recommends different things you can do in a new city or a country. And on Google Flights, you can now fliter prices to include the cost of carry-on luggage, and that’s going to be very useful if you love using affordable airlines.

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  • Bats

    17 December, 2018 - 3:02 pm

    <p>That's weird. Google had already been doing this, with regards to flight delays.</p>

    • joels

      17 December, 2018 - 3:14 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#383668">In reply to Bats:</a></em></blockquote><p>You mean telling you a flight is delayed? Yea, this is different, it's a prediction. This will tell you when your flight could be delayed, even if it's still showing "on time" on the board. </p>

  • SupaPete

    17 December, 2018 - 8:30 pm

    <p>Google is really super impressive with this type of stuff.</p><p>Last time i had a flight (a few months ago) i was at the airport and Google assistant reminded me that my flight was here and there at this time. I thought ok, sorta useful, i get the core info if i hadn't known it already. But then i was there sitting at the gate and on the displays there it showed the plane still on time but then i got a message from google that the plane was delayed x minutes.</p><p>I wondered because on the airport display it still showed the plane as on time.</p><p>then a few minutes later the airport display updated and showed the delay which had already been told to me a few minutes earlier by the google assistant. That was so far besides the cool stuff they do in google photos etc so far the most impressive google assistant thing to me so far, in that moment i was actually impressed and wondered how it happened they got the info and showed it even before the official displays at the airport =)</p><p>Dunno, cool if they got it even better now but it was already quite impressive to me back then.</p>

  • craigsn

    Premium Member
    18 December, 2018 - 6:29 am

    <p>There is another application that does this, but it isn't prediction, it follows the flight, and so you can see on the map where the plane actually is. FlightRadar24 is a fun app. It lets you see all of the flights to/from an airport, and you can track an individual flight. So if you want to know where a flight is, and a pretty accurate ETA, get the app. </p><p><br></p><p>PS. I don't work for FlightRadar, just a fan.</p>

    • bart

      Premium Member
      18 December, 2018 - 11:49 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#383806">In reply to craigsn:</a></em></blockquote><p>Agreed. Though having flight time predictions is a nice gimmick, it is still a gimmick. Flightradar24 sure helps me a lot I n my travels </p>

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