Google Now: hands-on with Jelly Bean's Siri competitor

We've spent some quality time with Google's new voice-enabled search and information system on Jelly Bean, Google Now. It's an interesting system that could be described as Google's take on Siri, but that's not entirely a fair description. Yes, Google Now allows you to perform searches by voice and provides a mix of pre-computed information along with web searches, but it goes further by offering persistent "cards" that automatically populate based on your searches.