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How good is Google travel estimate?

Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 12:37 pm
by ColinOldnCranky
Google Now popped up with an estiamte of my walking and riding distances for February this morning.

It seems that it estimates this by sampling movements with the phone's inbuilt accelorometer, determines from those movements its guess on what you are doing - walking/riding andhow far - and then extrapolates that for the month.

So - how good is it?

Well- it tells me that I walked 13km km for the month and rode 66km. I actually did around 550km.

And it doesn't take much activity to walk 13km.

I appreciate that it may have difficulty in determining that I am riding (speed between 9 and 13kph, with a fair bit lower as I amble through peds in malls and stuff, but then I would expect that it would all then go to the walking total.

I'm not fussed of course. And maybe there are soem smarts in Google that will somehow get it to wise up. But I would have thought that ti would at least be in the ball park.

Anyone else care to rate this invaluable :roll: service? How do you faire with it?