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

Hmm...

[Ikn]

This week, not only will we have answered the question of just how much of our knowledge we base from the Internet (Google, by and large), but how we can make it even easier to use. Anyone see any searchable database on the Web with the potential to topple what Google has become / could become?

Quantum Searching

[Infernon]

With technologies such as quantum computing down the road, I couldn't possibly envision a future where this isn't a possibility.
There was a short on NPR that explained it the best: Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number. Today we look through the phonebook one name at a time, but with quantum computing, we'd look at the entire phonebook at once.

This isn't about Google or Search.

[FreeLinux]

It's about voice recognition and its reliability. I think that everyone expects that this future is inevitable but, until voice recognition reaches a point were it can reliably interpret a vast vocabulary from multiple voices and accents, none of this can happen.

To be sure, progress is definitely being made in voice recognition technology. But, that progress is slow and we are still many stardates away from success.

Re:This isn't about Google or Search.

[NanoGator]

" until voice recognition reaches a point were it can reliably interpret a vast vocabulary from multiple voices and accents, none of this can happen."

That technology is here today. The big problem isn't in understanding the signals, it's in understanding the context. There are systems today that can hear what you're saying, and recognize when it hears a command. I have one of those R2-D2 toys. It is very good at hearing you say "Hey R2!". UPS has a phone system where it asks you to say out loud your tracking number. It worked! Even Microsoft's got a speech recognition demo. While playing with it, it was giving me a decent transcript of what it was hearing on TV. (Note: this wasn't intentional, I didn't have the mic like right up to the tv or anything.) Though I did have an amusing moment. My cat tried to jump in my lap, missed, and clawed into my leg. My computer thought I had called it a 'stupid little bench'.

The technology is more or less there, now the problem is context. How does the computer know if the word 'may' means may or May? How does the computer understand phrases like "Kick your butt"?

I have a solution to this problem. Though it's by no means easy to incorporate. A neural network has been built a few times before. I saw an experiment once where a robot arm with an electronic eye was tied to a neural net. They brought a child up to it and played with blocks. Within minutes, the child had taught the robot a game. She'd take a block and then wait. The robot would take a block and then wait. Then she'd take another one. The the robot would. And so on. The robot was not programmed to do this. The kid just taught the robot a very simple game.

Meanwhile, there are humanoid robots in development. They can walk. Cool, eh? Well imagine tying this guy into a neural net. It'd be strange at first, but over time, it would learn. It would learn english. It would even pick up slang.

Personally, I think this is the path to getting good voice recognition out of a computer. We need for one to live with us like we do. I don't think poking in a bunch of commands and if/then statements are going to do it.

Go to Webmasterworld

[Anonymous Coward]

On webmasterworld this very topic is discussed all the time (though mostly by search engine optimizers who apparently have nothing better to do with their time). If you can put up with the marketroids, it's actually a very useful website.

Alltheweb and Teoma seem to be Google's most credible challengers technology-wise, although Microsoft is also now developing its own search engine.

Google, seeing the risk, overhauled their search engine this summer--I wonder if anyone here has noticed the difference.

Ah, something like Apple....

[tliet]

...thought of in the 80s when they created the Knowledge Navigator clip. Scully's dream was to eventually create a computer that would act as an assistent that you could also ask questions. It would come back later when it found answers. Of course, the whole concept was a pipedream, but still, the Newton's 'Assist' button was one of the first steps towards that goal.

Too bad Jobs had to kill the Newton when he got back at Apple to finally do away with everything Scully.

Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME

[Xerithane]

It's an average search engine !

Google is an average search engine? Let me guess, you started getting downloaded on the internet sometime around 1999.

You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google. I switched to Google exclusively when it was still in beta.

Nothing unique in their software.
There is something unique, it's called PageRank. You may have seen it in the freaking patent system.

Apparently "Interesting" is now a synonym for "Factually Incorrect"

In the meanwhile, Google...

[ihatesco]

Google still can't come up with the whole situation on the planet, but it can do calculations like adding 2 + 2, dividing 17350 by 6, or convert 30 feets in metres.

Hell it even tells you the life, universe and everything!. + + + + Only thing I noticed, google images doesn't cache the goatseman's pic... :(

CYC

[Sanity]

This sounds like the CYC Project. For over a decade they have been trying to collect all human knowledge and explain it to a computer using a logical language they developed. They claim that it has applications in search, among many other things, and a natural language translator is part of the system they are developing. They have even released part of CYC as Open Source!

I haven't seen any "WOW!" things come out of the project yet, but you have to admire their "just do it" approach to AI.