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>The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. Sure it can, at

by H3g3m0n 13y ago

>The "Star Trek computer" interface that everyone wants can't function if it doesn't have a sense of the world and the person it's talking to. Sure it can, at least the sense of the person. I don't need your life story to know how to handle simple instructions like "what year was movie X released", or "Gimme a list of all the elements on the periodic table that contain the letter U in their names". Sure things like "What time is my flight" will need details, but "What time is flight QF204" doesn't. The other thing is that the Star Trek computer doesn't have to be in the cloud, it can be on your device. Or it can be both, with the local one keeping your private stuff.

hahainternet 13y ago
> Sure it can, at least the sense of the person. I don't need your life story to know how to handle simple instructions like "what year was movie X released", or "Gimme a list of all the elements on the periodic table that contain the letter U in their names". Then that's not the Star Trek computer is it? That is a personal organiser that responds to voice. Google are clearly aiming beyond this.
jmillikin 13y ago
"what year was movie X released" is an easy query to answer. It doesn't require much context, it doesn't need any information about the user, and movie release dates are widely available in many public sources. But there's no reason that search engines should be limited to trivial searches of public data. A modern search engine needs to be able to handle situations like: * User has a reservation at a local restaurant, so they ask [where's lunch] and want to receive the time and location of their reservation. And they want driving directions, unless they don't own a car, in which case they want directions from the nearest public transport. * User just got back from Hawaii and wants to show their coworkers a photo they took of a cool wave. So they search for [wave picture] and want the picture they took to be in their search results. * User is writing a PhD thesis on tree rings and found a useful article last month, but now they want to cite it and can't remember what it was called. So they search for [article about tree rings] and want that particular article to be the first result. In other words, the 2001 model of a search engine as "grep for the web" is far behind what people expect in 2013.
- ippisl 13y ago
  Even with those use cases, there should be some technologies and controls who help keep privacy who help filter, encrypt , store locally, anonymize and transform all kinds of types of information about a person's searches and surfing. A simple example would be: give me an easy option to disable recording only my health related searches. And those are relatively simple technologies to implement.

by H3g3m0n 13y ago

hahainternet 13y ago

> Sure it can, at least the sense of the person. I don't need your life story to know how to handle simple instructions like "what year was movie X released", or "Gimme a list of all the elements on the periodic table that contain the letter U in their names". Then that's not the Star Trek computer is it? That is a personal organiser that responds to voice. Google are clearly aiming beyond this.

jmillikin 13y ago

"what year was movie X released" is an easy query to answer. It doesn't require much context, it doesn't need any information about the user, and movie release dates are widely available in many public sources. But there's no reason that search engines should be limited to trivial searches of public data. A modern search engine needs to be able to handle situations like: * User has a reservation at a local restaurant, so they ask [where's lunch] and want to receive the time and location of their reservation. And they want driving directions, unless they don't own a car, in which case they want directions from the nearest public transport. * User just got back from Hawaii and wants to show their coworkers a photo they took of a cool wave. So they search for [wave picture] and want the picture they took to be in their search results. * User is writing a PhD thesis on tree rings and found a useful article last month, but now they want to cite it and can't remember what it was called. So they search for [article about tree rings] and want that particular article to be the first result. In other words, the 2001 model of a search engine as "grep for the web" is far behind what people expect in 2013.

ippisl 13y ago
Even with those use cases, there should be some technologies and controls who help keep privacy who help filter, encrypt , store locally, anonymize and transform all kinds of types of information about a person's searches and surfing. A simple example would be: give me an easy option to disable recording only my health related searches. And those are relatively simple technologies to implement.