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New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain'

Posted by Soulskill on from the siri-why-does-my-cat-throw-up-so-much? dept.

paysonwelch sends this report from Wired on the next generation of consumer AI: Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like "Where was Abraham Lincoln born?" And it can name the city. You can also say, "What is the population?" of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?" The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in." Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom.

2 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is important by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yea, its important ... because they've just realized they need to do multi-part/nested queries.

    Its not really impressive, its a 'no shit sherlock', and I'm blown away that google can't do this already.

    Watson can.

    The important part is that someone just realized they need to do one query, look at the type answer and then use that to generate a new query.

    Well, okay, its not really important or even new ... as I said, Watson can do it and has been able to for years.

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  2. Google Now Does Understand Context by Forthan+Red · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... to a limited degree. While you can't ask the Lincoln question in a single statement, you can ask, "Where was Lincoln born?" then when it replies "Hodgenville, KY", you can then say "What is its population?", or "Show it on a map" and it will know from context that the "its" you're referring to, is Lincoln's birthplace.