I got updated over night. I HATE IT! With a passion. No longer can you just long press the button and get the cards you're interested in. No longer can you type a query. No, now you need to TALK to your stupid phone. I could easily use Google Now anywhere. But can you imagine talking to your phone in the middle of a meeting? Or during a wedding? Or in any of the thousands of other places where talking out loud is annoying, embarrassing, or downright rude? Where you might want to be discrete? I added a gesture to Nova Launcher to start Google Now, but that only works from a home screen, unlike a long press of the home button.
And there's no option for going back to Google Now. There's a kludgy work-around, by changing your phone's language to Virgin Island English, but it is, at best, a temporary fix, because Google will eventually roll this out to all English languages, just as they did Now.
Thanks for forcing this unwanted bloatware on me, Google. Thanks for nothing, that is.
Do Google's employees really sit around work all day talking to their phones? Maybe they should go out into the real world and see how real people work and play.