Is Google's Future: Star Trek? 446
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.
Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Quantum Searching (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I can see it already... (Score:3, Interesting)
Go to Webmasterworld (Score:4, Interesting)
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:This isn't about Google or Search. (Score:1, Interesting)
A fine selection of pointy objects at Sam's point object emporium.
A visit by a local law enforcement type to see if I really meant "kill the bastard".
A lawsuit from actor that played said bastard for "emotional distress".
No thanks, the things I mutter under my breath should stay there and not be interperted by anyone, much less a computer.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:NLP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually the two are distinct but related concepts...
Natural Language Processing is the science of how to take a grammatical statement and parse it. Breaking it down into nouns and verbs and subjects and objects and whatever, and then representing the symantic links that describe how these concepts modify each other in a grammatical context.
Voice recognition is the science of taking spoken language and transcribing it to a context-specific computer representation.
The two technologies can be married, in that the context-specific output of voice recognition be a NLP parsing structure... but they don't have to be. Back when I was reading AI mags every week (about 4-5 years ago), all the voice recognition guys were outputing ASCII and all the NLP guys were inputing ASCII but that was as close as they got to working together...
Ah, something like Apple.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell it even tells you the life, universe and everything! [google.com]. + + + + Only thing I noticed, google images [slashdot.org] doesn't cache the goatseman's pic... :(
if Google==StarTrek Computer, then Microsoft==M5 (Score:1, Interesting)
This degree of natural language processing (NLP) is far beyond the current state of the art. Google, with its miniscule research budget, is not likely to invent the technology any time soon even though Google [slashdot.org] appears to favor H-1B workers over American workers.
Here is where Microsoft steps into the picture. Microsoft is currently building a R & D laborary [boston.com] that is the equal of the former Bell Laboratories before the breakup of Ma Bell. Like the old Ma Bell, Microsoft is a monopoly and earns monopoly profits that it invests into research. Microsoft is investing $6.8 billion into research and is hiring an additional 5000 researchers. Microsoft is conducting the kind of long-term R & D that once characterized Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at IBM and will surely snare a Nobel Prize or two.
Right now, American Ph.D. graduates who want to work on long-term research in industry choose Microsoft as their #1 pick for employer.
Microsoft will create the NLP search engine of the future and will bury Google.
CYC (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
AskJeeves? (Score:2, Interesting)
Interpret your question and hopefully give you a suitable answer... but it's not perfect yet.
Come to think of it, isn't that also what Clippit/Clippy [microsoft.com] tried to do, much to the world's chagrin?
Something I hope comes out of this. (Score:2, Interesting)
As I was reading the comments attached to this story, one point kept coming to mind. Maybe, just maybe, this type of idea could be the savior of human language.
Bear with me on this.
Leet-speak aside, vocal (as well as written) communication has (IMHO) been deteriorating at a rather rapid pace. Now, it could just be the fact that I am working in a direct customer contact position again, and I have to deal with the general public on a more frequent level than I used to. But it simply amazes me the number of people who cannot communicate what it is that they are thinking.
"I am looking for one of those orangishy whatchamacallits wit' that springy thingish-like doohickey on the end"
He wanted a pipe wrench.
*eep*
If this technology were to become as ubiquitous as google has become as a search engine, people who wanted to be able to use this technology would have to learn to communicate clearly and concisely.
(Yes, I am well aware of the fact that I have certainly not mastered those skills myself, so please don't flame me, its just an idea)
In reality, the ACLU would probably sue the programmers until the language heuristics were so loose that it would become unusable, because some idiot with money and power got upset because his new "Google enviromental information interface" kept telling him that there was no such word as nookular.
Wouldn't it be great though, to see people actually interested in learning how to communicate better, because they have been given a technological incentive, instead of dumbing down the interface because they are too lazy to learn how to use it?
</Pipe Dream>
NLP Laboratory at Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Or, more probably... (Score:2, Interesting)
...or the damnable epinions pages, with absolutely no comments or useful information.
Bastards. I wish google would just "mod them down" manually - there can't be that many of them.
Re:This isn't about Google or Search. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME (Score:3, Interesting)
It's quite easy to build a system that analyses something for a certain property, be it the net, the stockmarket, society, etc. etc. unfortunately, as soon as this system becomes well known, everyone tries to manipulate it. In the stockmarket people try to create formations common in technical analysis to make other traders buy/sell a certain stock, and in internet searching people set up huge arrays of pages referencing each other or scatter ridiculous numbers of irrelevant key-words over their page.
I think i read it the first time in one of the old Asimov books, that to predict something well the predicted system must have no knowledge of the prediction... (note to physicsts, i'm talking of systems involving people, not a mass on a spring
Ponxx
Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME (Score:1, Interesting)
Alta Vista [digital.com] was very good in its time. Trouble is, "its time" was before people start heavily spamming the search engines.
When people learned how to abuse the system, it broke. Now people are learning how to abuse PageRank.
Apparently "Interesting" is now a synonym for "Factually Incorrect"
That's a very interesting observation.