Slashdot Mirror
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.
Make it so. :)
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Captain: Tea, hot, Earl grey.
Computer: Did you mean Hot Teen URL's
[Scotty talking into Mac+ mouse] Computer? Hello computer?
Must-not-watch TV!
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
Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number.
Hmmm...
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
> "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?"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Hell it even tells you the life, universe and everything!. + + + + Only thing I noticed, google images doesn't cache the goatseman's pic... :(
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
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.