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.
Computer, mod me up! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Computer, mod me up! (Score:5, Funny)
A binary only runtime license to mod you up will shortly be availiable for $699.
--Darl McBride
Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux search terms tend to take me to the wrong places all the time. (Google groups works better). Enternainment and move title search times take me to the wrong places. Generic searchs "whats the weather like in Mountain View california" are AWFUL. Searching for hotel/resort information in an area is awful (takes me to package tour sites).
In all these examples, Google takes me to
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 irrelevan
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"
Re:Google DID NOT invent Page ranking. (Score:3, Informative)
Hey kid, before you embarass yourself any further why don't you just go ahead and look at what PageRank actually is. Google did invent what they call "PageRank." It's name is a touch misleading
Re:Google DID NOT invent Page ranking. (Score:3, Informative)
PageRank was named after one of its creators: Larry Page. Sure, it's a pun, but it really is named after Larry Page.
Re:hey boy (Score:3, Informative)
page rank is self explanatory.
Is it really? It's certainly beyond obvious that pages must be ranked; what's really not obvious or self-explanatory is how to rank them. CNet ranks by number of downloads, but that can't be done for web pages, because there's no system that can monitor page views. Altavista, Lycos, etc., tried to rank pages based on which ones had the closest matches to the search terms. That worked pretty will in 1995, when the web was much smaller, but soon grew to suck and was trivia
Re:Google is getting way too much attention fromME (Score:3, Funny)
What about Pigeon Rank??
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Microsoft doesn't know how to do research. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing good has come of it in all the years of its existence.
Where's the story. (Score:3, Insightful)
I imagine if you ask Microsoft, Apple, or Palm, they'll mimic those goals. NLP, instant searching, instant translations, it's all well and good, but where's the story?
Re:Where's the story. (Score:3, Funny)
KFG
Re:Where's the story. (Score:2, Informative)
This is not an NLP problem.
It is an AI problem.
As long as it's name is 'Computer'... (Score:2)
I can see it already... (Score:5, Funny)
Computer: Did you mean Hot Teen URL's
Re:I can see it already... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can see it already... (Score:2)
Hmm... (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:Hmm... (Score:3)
Well, maybe. But Google can easilly regain any losses my simply making a text-to-speech interface, and have Majel Roddenberry [roddenberry.com] do the voice.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
I don't why it didn't occur to me before, but something about your statement set off alarm bells in my little head. Maybe there's more to Google than meets the eye. Maybe, they should have named it, SkyNet.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Let the ST jokes fly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let the ST jokes fly (Score:2, Funny)
Just one thing... (Score:2, Funny)
Driving Innovation (Score:2)
Whether that's good or bad, I suppose, depends on you...
Re:Driving Innovation (Score:2, Offtopic)
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.
Re:Quantum Searching (Score:2)
Cute, but wrong. Phone books are invariably in sorted order and a simple binary search scales well past anything we'll ever need to worry about.
And the quantum computer has be large enough to hold the entire phonebook at once while remaining in an entangled state
Re:Quantum Searching (Score:2)
I think you're the kind of person who in 1993 would not have "laid money on" something as crazy as a 5 GHz processor, too.
"Gee, the rate of advancement of computer technology has only blown us away 188747121 times in the past. It surely won't do it again."
I'm laughing at you preemptively.
Re:Quantum Searching (Score:2)
Re:Quantum Searching (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number.
Hmmm...
Re:Quantum Searching (Score:2)
I'm not sure if it requires the phone company to give the information to google, but my number, my parents number and my inlaws' numbers were in there, and we are all in different states with different phone companies.
Re:Quantum Searching (Score:2)
Funny, if I only have their number I would look through the phonebook one number at a time.
AI searches (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AI searches (Score:3, Funny)
AI Computer: User, I'm sorry, but I cannot allow that. *zap!*
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:This isn't about Google or Search. (Score:2)
rtfa, smart guy. (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
Re:This isn't about Google or Search. (Score:4, Insightful)
The hard part is figuring out what I'm asking. When I say "What's going on in the world?" what do I want to know? If I ask "when's the next showing of LotR?" how does it figure all that out? Or even better is how to personalize it. If I ask "Is there anything on TV?" I don't expect "Yes." I expect it to know what kinda stuff I may like and base it's answer on that (talking TiVo?)
Basically I want a mix between the Enterprise and KITT.
Q&A used to have this built into their database years ago. You could ask it questions such as "how many widgets were sold in march?". If it didn't know what a widget was, it'd prompt you on how to define one (ie. where column B='WIDGET') and would ask you how to determin if something was sold, etc... This was back in around '86 or so. Way ahead of it's time.
It's about librarians! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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:This isn't about Google or Search. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3)
1) Arrive early and get front row seat for keynote session at voice recognition trade show.
2) Wait for keynote speaker to load up PowerPoint.
3) Yell "START! RUN! CMD! ENTER! F
"Computer! What's the situation (RESPONSE) (Score:2)
I thought in the ST world computers cannot handle complex nuiances of the english language like contractions.
Re:"Computer! What's the situation (RESPONSE) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"Computer! What's the situation (RESPONSE) (Score:2)
Considering Data wrote new subroutines for himself fairly frequently I never understood why couldn't co
Beam me up... (Score:2)
(BTW, yes I checked)
Cool but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cool but (Score:2)
The one place where I want a full voice interface is when I'm doing something else and my interaction with the computer is secondary. Like driving a car, entertaining guests ("Computer, what's at the movie theater tonight?"), that sort of thing.
And maybe that's Google's point. Stop making the computer the primary focus of every computer interaction. An essential part of ubiquitous computing is that it enables more modes
Nonlinear Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Visually you can look at a screen of replies and skip to the next "line" instantly if the current line is not what you want. Difficult for audio.
Also, you can look at the screen as a whole and can often see the answer you desire because it essentially "jumps out at you" from visual filtering. Listening to all the audio output as a whole will most likely give you not
Or, more probably... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh silly me, that isn't what YOU want, so we must change everything.
We need understanding.... (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer: I did write one of the papers.
Computer, who is the president of Sol, er Earth. (Score:2)
NLP? (Score:2)
Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
Re:NLP? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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 repres
Re:NLP? (Score:3, Funny)
Guilty as charged. (Score:2)
Re:NLP? (Score:2)
"The best we can do in the meantime is "fake it"" (Score:2)
www.garble.com
Google is very geek-friendly (Score:2)
The problem with audio feedback. (Score:2)
Maybe we could hook the feedback up to those double speed DVD players to speed up the process.
Beaming up? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a Nice Thing, but does anyone have any insight into exactly how far off into the future we are looking?
- speech recognition systems leave quite a lot to be desired
- is there *anything* out there that's able to put stuff into context {so to speak}
- if it's far enough off, the whole multiple-language thing will take care of itself - the number of languages is dwindling each year
will be nice to have, though.
Oh - wait. Probably won't be in my
grin (Score:3)
Somebody reads slashdot
Let's see what Googles response is to ... (Score:2)
What does God need with a starship? [google.com]
If Google's the future, stop the world, I want off (Score:2)
More like HAL than Star Trek, IMNSHO.
Computer - What's the fuss about goatse.cx? (Score:2)
And Spenser Tracy as Craig Silverstein (Score:2)
Of course, instead of overloading its buffer with
Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight [numachi.com], just consider a plethora of pop-up ads.
Not Quite (Score:2)
I can definitely see google searching by speech, but results will almost certainly come back via a visual display. This is part of that classic paradox of communication: We read faster than we hear, but we speak faster than we write. Particularly with google, which has easily scannable chunks of content that hyperlink you to what you're looking for, speech reply would be a horribly inefficient channel to introduce except for the most straightforward questions.
I do expect voice contro
star wars (Score:2)
I just felt one million beowulf cluster jokes failing all at once.
Dude, someone haxxored my Sorlac Pit.
Your Google Death Star is 0wn3d.
In the future, Soviet Russia will blah blah blah.
Great, now I can replace all those grad students (Score:2)
Not.
I can see it now:
"Now reading 1 of 3625 context relevant sites."
We didn't start writing things down because of a lack of people to read them aloud. At the time we started doing that there where people whose job it was to recite things from memory. Bible's, Vedas, whatever.
No, we started writing things down because it was a superiour way to access most information. It remains so. Ask any blind person trying to do research on the internet (yes, I work with one
I would very much like to see this. (Score:3)
All of which, of course, are things that we've been promised for years/decades are "right around the corner", yet always fail to materialize.
They were saying we'd all be in flying cars now in the 1960s... where's my aero-Ford?
Yeah right (Score:2)
Retorical filter, please (Score:3, Funny)
That, and I don't really want my coworkers hearing "Computer, get me some boobies!" from my office.
inefficiency (Score:2)
Non-computer people love to throw around the star-trek computer interface as the future, but the actual utility of it is questionab
Some things should remail silent for privacy... (Score:2)
Is news's future (Score:2)
Future of search engines are neural networks (Score:2, Insightful)
The future of searching is: Computers will NOT search as they do today. They will be based on the model of the human brain and how it addresses "memory", by activating nodes in a massive neural network.
actually.. (Score:2)
several places including IBM research labs have working versions of this technology..
What's with voice controlled computers? (Score:2)
The downside.... (Score:2)
Googleliza (Score:5, Funny)
"How does it make you feel to ask what's the situation down on the planet?"
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:Ah, something like Apple.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You actually think Jobs did that just because it was a Scully project? Jobs did what he had to do to get the company back into the black. He had two major areas to focus on: 1. getting the Mac into the public again (with the iMac); and 2. cramming NeXT's operating system expertise crammed into the heart-and-soul of every Mac. The Newton had already gave way to the Palm line; did you want Jobs to fi
Meanwhile, I wish Google supported Boolean queries (Score:3, Insightful)
(potato or potatoe) and ((fried or mashed) and gravy)
It's my only peeve about that wonderful search engine.
Probably more like Galaxy Quest (Score:4, Insightful)
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... :(
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.
NLP? (Score:3)
Re:bullshit, google is retarded. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:bullshit, google is retarded. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:bullshit, google is retarded. (Score:2)
how to replace a washer in a leaky faucet
That's odd. Google returned this [essortment.com] site as its number 1 result, and it's exactly what someone would be looking for.
Re:bullshit, google is retarded. (Score:2)
Sooo... you're theory is that Google is retarded because retarded people don't know how to use Google?
Are cars incapable of being driven properly because incapable people drive cars then?
Or, are guns incapable of hitting a target because people with no aim use guns?
Seriously... get a grip. If you're not smart enough to realize that the word 'in' could appear in 32 bazillion pages, maybe you aren't smart enough to be using a search engine yet... smarter technology is not a good subsitute for intelligence
Re:bullshit, google is retarded. (Score:2)
The first page is full of useful results. Yes, there are two links at the top that are commercial. There's a bunch down the side that are commercial too. And it's pretty damned obvious that none of them are what you're looking for.
But the rest of the page has exactly what you're looking for -- online sites that go through how to fix a leaky faucet step by step, often including illustrations.
Until they quit making assu
Re:bullshit, google is retarded. (Score:2)
Okay, I'll bite.
Go ahead and do that search. Here, I'll make it easy for you [google.com].
I'd like you to notice that the hits all match what you wanted -- replacing a washer in a leaky faucet.
The whole point is that the "how" "to" "a" and "in " *are* common words, so they're not needed for a successful search. In fact, if you entered that as a phrase you'd be less likely to get effective results, because not everyone might phrase it the way you did, even though they're offering the information you want.
The
Re:Microsoft Standard Takeover (Score:2)
Re:It is unfortunate to hear the CTO of Google (Score:4, Insightful)
However, do NOT underestimate the desire that "average Joes" have to be free of keyboards.
When you're a blue-collar factory worker with a dumpy crappy Compaq running Windows XP Home and connecting to the Internet through AOL, and you can type all of 5 words per minute on a GOOD day by hunting and pecking, the one thing you want the MOST is to be able to talk to the thing. I predict that in the future, keyboards will ONLY be used by programmers (as we're virtually the only ones who need to type funky things like "printf("Hello, World\n");" that would be a RIDICULOUS pain to input with voice), and they will cost a huge amount. Also, it is likely that they will only work with Windows. KEYBOARDS ARE GOING TO BECOME EXTREMELY RARE, and hence EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE, since most people CAN'T type faster than they can talk.