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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.
I know google's great and all, but this is basically a "we want to be able to do everything cool with computers and AI, but we don't know when that's going to happen" type story.
I imagine if you ask Microsoft, Apple, or Palm, they'll mimic those goals. NLP, instant searching, instant translations, it's all well and good, but where's the story?
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Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
Are not that far off, but with my work in AI or "smart" anything devices, always come up with the same results. The weakest link is not the technoligy but more so the people using it. Remember, everytime you think you make something idiot proof, they build a better idiot.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
As humans a lot of our brainpower is geared towards interpreting visual input. Its will always be a lot faster for me to look at the pages of hits returned and determine what is of interest to me than it will be to listen to a computer voice and try to figure it out. Speaking to the computer is OK but in many situations I will want visual, not aural feedback
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
You will ask "Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?" and you get 100 sites, all linked to each other, that have this phrase crammed into a mass of links and search-engine-bait, all trying to sell you cable de-scramblers and viagra.
Ever notice the 'rot' that is occuring on google lately? For example, a search on "mercedes 300D transmission" used to bring up the article on mbz.org about adjusting the vacuum shift in this car. Now this link, the most useful one, is all the way on the third or fourth page, buried in OEM parts retaillers that you know damn well are ranked high thanks to "ranking services".
I hope they can figure out how to weed this kind of stuff out...
+++ ATH0 +++
Yeah, because there's all those websites that talk about faucet and washer porn without using the word how.
Except, when I searched that phrase, the first link is "How to fix leaky faucet," then "Fred and Gerry on leaky faucets," another, "How to fix leaky faucet," next is "Repair a leaky faucet in six steps," then "Repair a leaky washer-type faucet," and it just goes on from there.
Too bad none of those had to do with fixing leaky faucets.
Not quite so bad as you describe. The voice regocnition system does and will work in a very similar fashion as is used when conversing with a human. While you might blurt out "kill the bastard" your friend, sitting next to you, would not respond to it as a command directed at them. In order to direct a command at your friend, you would say "John, kill the bastard". In this case saying the persons name, obviously, alerts them that you are directing your conversation at them.
Computer voice recognition works in a similar fashion. The computer waits for a keyword or trigger before it accepts input directed at it. So you would say, "Computer, kill the bastard". Saying the keyword "Computer" alerts the computer that this is an istruction that is directed at it rather just some background noise or other conversation that it is not expected to act upon.
This brings us to the keyword itself. Depending on the environment using "Computer" as the keyword or trigger may not be a good choice. For instance in an IT environment the word computer is likely to come up often which would cause undesirable commands to be arbitrarily executed in a voice recognition situation. Similar problems occur today in home automation environments where people name their automation system(set the trigger) to a word that is too often used in the course of a normal converstation, like a friend's or pet's name. This causes undesirable results or a confused system. Instead they must choose a name that is both pleasing to them and is unlikely to be used in the home for any other reason than addressing the automation system.
You're kidding, right? Do you even remember how searching was before Google came around? Google revolutionized Internet searching, and last time I checked they continue to lead the pack. They get a lot of publicity because a lot of people look to them for the next big thing (and rightly so IMHO).
-- Kircle
Where every team has to have one employee whose sole job is to talk to the computer!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Voice recognition is actually the simple part.
The hard part is figuring out what I'm asking. When I say "What's going on in the world?" what do I want to know? If I ask "when's the next showing of LotR?" how does it figure all that out? Or even better is how to personalize it. If I ask "Is there anything on TV?" I don't expect "Yes." I expect it to know what kinda stuff I may like and base it's answer on that (talking TiVo?)
Basically I want a mix between the Enterprise and KITT.
Q&A used to have this built into their database years ago. You could ask it questions such as "how many widgets were sold in march?". If it didn't know what a widget was, it'd prompt you on how to define one (ie. where column B='WIDGET') and would ask you how to determin if something was sold, etc... This was back in around '86 or so. Way ahead of it's time.
What you just said is the "geek perspective" on things, and I agree with that.
However, do NOT underestimate the desire that "average Joes" have to be free of keyboards.
When you're a blue-collar factory worker with a dumpy crappy Compaq running Windows XP Home and connecting to the Internet through AOL, and you can type all of 5 words per minute on a GOOD day by hunting and pecking, the one thing you want the MOST is to be able to talk to the thing. I predict that in the future, keyboards will ONLY be used by programmers (as we're virtually the only ones who need to type funky things like "printf("Hello, World\n");" that would be a RIDICULOUS pain to input with voice), and they will cost a huge amount. Also, it is likely that they will only work with Windows. KEYBOARDS ARE GOING TO BECOME EXTREMELY RARE, and hence EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE, since most people CAN'T type faster than they can talk.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
That's part of it. But the bigger problem I see with this scenario is getting humans to verbalize what they're really looking for. I work for a public library, answering computer questions for the public. Finding the answer is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is getting the public to accurately explain what the hell they're looking for.
That requires two things:
1. Knowing what they really are looking for
2. Being able to verbalize it
In some ways, the written word is superior because often when they write the actual words, people are more specific about what they need. Usually they've considered it and narrowed it down a bit (though not always).
Real life examples of humans searching for info:
"Where are the art books?" Actual need: tattoo information
"I need a book on Microsoft." Actual need: Learning that the Enter key will move you down to the next line when using a word processing program such as Word
"When I was little, I really liked this book you had. The little girl in it was named Jane or Joan, I think. I think it was blue. Do you know it?"
As you can see, many people do not give enough information or context on their first try. So computers would have to learn how to ask questions for more input and get people to narrow things down. And while that's easy in some situations, it can be difficult to guess the correct context in others.
That technology seems years away to me.