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

Computer, mod me up!

[grasshoppa]

Make it so. :)

Re:Computer, mod me up!

[Anonymous Coward]

As you are no doubt aware google is built upon linux which is a derivative of UNIX SysV. Therefore Google is our intellectual property.

A binary only runtime license to mod you up will shortly be availiable for $699.

--Darl McBride

I can see it already...

[MoxCamel]

Captain: Tea, hot, Earl grey.
Computer: Did you mean Hot Teen URL's

Let the ST jokes fly

[MasTRE]

[Scotty talking into Mac+ mouse] Computer? Hello computer?

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.

Re:Quantum Searching

[DoNotTauntHappyFunBa]

Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number.

Hmmm...

1. Pick up telephone
2. Dial phone number

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.

[FreeLinux]

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.

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.

Cool but

[Timesprout]

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

Or, more probably...

[caffeineboy]

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...

Re:Or, more probably...

[1029]

Unless of course you want to buy a Mercedes transmission...

Oh silly me, that isn't what YOU want, so we must change everything.

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.

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.

Re:bullshit, google is retarded.

[FroBugg]

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.

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."

Googleliza

[hoggoth]

> "Computer! What's the situation down on the planet?"

"How does it make you feel to ask what's the situation down on the planet?"

Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME

[Kircle]

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).

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.

It's about librarians!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about voice recognition and its reliability.

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.