Is Google's Future: Star Trek?

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet UK has an interview with Google's CTO, Craig Silverstein, and he's got some pretty cool visions: "When search grows up, it will look like Star Trek: you talk into the air ("Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?") and the computer processes your question, figures out its context, figures out what response you're looking for, searches a giant database in who-knows-how-many languages, translates/analyses/summarises all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice." Now that's the search engine I want." The NLP required for this is far off, but it sure will be cool when we get there.

Comments

We need understanding....

[Yoda2]

Here are several recent papers by people working to make computers start 'understanding' language.

Disclaimer: I did write one of the papers.

Re:NLP?

[FreeLinux]

Natural Language Processing or voice recognition.

I guess that there are still those amongst us that insist on trying to supplement their inadequacies by babbling in acronyms.

I've always said that if you think it's cool or leet to speak using acronyms, you should go all out and speak in hieroglyphics.

rtfa, smart guy.

[Elwood P Dowd]

More context for that quote:

"When search grows up, it will look like Star Trek: you talk into the air ("Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?") and the computer processes your question, figures out its context, figures out what response you're looking for, searches a giant database in who-knows-how-many languages, translates/analyses/summarises all the results, and presents them back to you in a pleasant voice. I think this technology is about, oh, 300 years off. Just getting the computer to understand your question, much less the context it's being asked in, is way beyond the state of the art in computer science right now."