Artificial Intelligence
Google's natural language voice search capability just took a tremendous leap in its understanding of your voice. More than just single words and short phrases, the company claims it is now able to understand the meaning behind your questions.
Google's work on artificial intelligence and natural language understanding has yielded some big advances, the company has reported on their blog. With voice enabled interfaces increasingly becoming important, especially on mobile devices, the competition to create the most accurate and smart systems is on.
"Now we’re “growing up” just a little more. The Google app is starting to truly understand the meaning of what you’re asking."
Google took its first steps understanding and answering questions with voice search in 2008, and with he Knowledge Graph in 2012. While the first systems could only make out single words and phrases items like “mama” or “car,” the Knowledge Graph started by providing information on individual entities like “Barack Obama” or “Shah Rukh Khan.”
"We graduated to answering simple questions about those entities, so you could ask “How old is Stan Lee?” or “What did Leonardo da Vinci invent?” We soon got a little smarter, so if you asked “What are the ingredients for a screwdriver?”, we understood you meant the cocktail and not the tool," writes Google Product Manager Satyajeet Salgar,
"Now we’re “growing up” just a little more. The Google app is starting to truly understand the meaning of what you’re asking. We can now break down a query to understand the semantics of each piece..."
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According to the post, Google voice search is now starting to understand the intent behind the question. This allows the system to use the Knowledge Graph much more reliably to find the right facts and compose a useful answer—and they can use this base to answer harder questions.
Here are a few new types of complex questions Google can now handle. Google now understands superlatives—”tallest,” “largest,” etc.—and ordered items. So you can ask the Google app:
- “Who are the tallest Mavericks players?”
- “What are the largest cities in Texas?”
- “What are the largest cities in Iowa by area?”
Second, Google now has a much better understanding of questions with dates in them. So you can ask:
- “What was the population of Singapore in 1965?”
- “What songs did Taylor Swift record in 2014?”
- “What was the Royals roster in 2013?”
Finally, complex combinations are now better understood too. So Google can now respond to questions like:
- “What are some of Seth Gabel's father-in-law's movies?”
- “What was the U.S. population when Bernie Sanders was born?”
- “Who was the U.S. President when the Angels won the World Series?”
"We’re still growing and learning," admits Salgar which means the system still make mistakes. But the progress is very apparent, and shows just how far artificial intelligence is progressing.
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