Yes I too am skeptical. I work in the area of natural language interfaces and when I hear their claims I cringe. My own feeling is that NLIs can be useful, bu

Yes I too am skeptical. I work in the area of natural language interfaces and when I hear their claims I cringe. My own feeling is that NLIs can be useful, but really only in closed domains. In fact my own efforts are toward NLIs to relational databases. If I understand their approach, they are building semantic indicies over large sets of documents (e.g. wikipedia). Sure you can match the user's query using these indicies but the inference thereafter certainly must be very weak. Yes any functionality this gives could probably be achieved with simple IR based techniques. Still I am curious about how this will all go down once they launch a public interface... Still, I will be pleased if they actually show something of value. Time will tell.