This is a major move for two reasons. The first is that it really brings Google back to a place of dominance as the glue that holds your digital life together. The web has thrived and grown in no small part because of Google's ability to track, organize, and understand all of its disparate pieces. Now it's able to do the same thing with every app running on your phone. It allows Google to get back into the search game but by speaking the common language of apps. It gives the company a second life with access to user behavior and needs.

But secondly, it starts to show how Google can be an interconnecting layer between the apps themselves — a kind of neutral staging ground between one action and another. This is a sea-change for how we use our mobile devices and how mobile apps interact with one another. Currently, we use OS-defined tools which let apps interact with each other (with rules defined by the OS-makers, not developers). But imagine if developers didn't have to think about how their work connects to the rest of your world? Imagine if Now on Tap is aware enough of the core functions of those apps that it can predict what you'd most likely want to do with them, and then execute on those needs?

That's the ultimate promise of Now on Tap — and it's a game-changing one.

However, the technology has its limits. There's no chance a service like this will ever make its way to Apple's iOS given the closed nature of the operating system (and the fact that Apple will undoubtedly take a stab at the same concept). And Google also has to prove that this kind of natural language processing can work effectively enough to live up to the company's promise of a seamless experience.

But if the service is as impressive as what Google just showed off on stage in San Francisco — there is a whole new world ahead of us for our devices. One that's more connected than ever.

http://www.benefitspro.com/2015/04/28/will-the-watch-be-apples-best-product-ever