Google Finance is not a new product—it has been around for 20 years, long enough that it initially relied on Flash to display charts and graphs. The website has gotten a few major updates over the years, but it has never had a mobile app until now. Google has released the first standalone app for Google Finance, which is currently exclusive to Android, with iOS planned for later this year.
The app is available globally in the Play Store, but that’s not the only update to Google’s financial tracker. The AI-powered makeover for the Finance website is also leaving beta, making Google’s chatbot a core part of the experience. Naturally, the mobile app includes a heaping helping of generative AI that aims to make sense of irrational financial markets.
If you’ve checked out the new Finance web experience, you’ll see a lot of familiar features in the app. You can create watchlists, monitor real-time market data, and keep up with financial news in one place. While perusing graphs of stock performance, Finance will use AI to generate “key moments” that can explain why the numbers changed. This feature initially launched in the Finance web interface in May.
The mobile app also gets Google’s new AI research tool, accessible via the “Ask” button floating at the bottom of the UI. This allows users to converse with Google’s money-tuned bot about stocks. The bottom bar also includes a History section where you can easily access your past chats.
Google says that the current Android app is just a starting point. It plans to adapt more features from the new website to the app over time. Consequently, the updated website has a few features you won’t find in the app. While you can build a watchlist in the app by searching for stock symbols, the website has an expansive portfolio feature. Portfolios from the old Finance will port over, gaining new AI insights and suggestions. You can also upload a CSV or PDF to build a trackable portfolio in Google Finance. The chatbot has access to your portfolio data and can answer questions taking that into account.
The Finance website is also gaining a new AI-powered research tool that can send you periodic updates. Google suggests something like: “Send me a daily pre-market briefing analyzing significant overnight moves across major cryptocurrencies.”
Whatever you’re interested in, be that crypto or something marginally less sketchy, you’ll get notifications through the mobile app when your research reports are ready. They will also be viewable in the web version’s research panel.
Few industries have adopted generative AI as readily as finance. Many of the investments and market trends that lead to numbers going up or down are driven by AI models. So maybe a hallucinatory robot is what you need to make sense of the nonsense. Google has you covered there.
