Advances in Conversational Search

Here a long time interest in intelligent conversation, and one of the most used uses of conversation on line these days is search.   Intelligent conversation gets us much closer to general AI.    Has this now been considerably improved?  Are we getting much closer, or is this one more demo that cannot be broadly delivered?   Note too how Google mentions people adapting to machines with 'keyword-ese'  and avoiding natural conversation. 

Google now understands more conversational search queries
The tech giant says it's one of the biggest Search updates in the product's history.
By Mariella Moon, @mariella_moon  in Engadget ..... 

Understanding searches better than ever before
Pandu Nayak in the Google Blog
Google Fellow and Vice President, Search

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the 15 years working on Google Search, it’s that people’s curiosity is endless. We see billions of searches every day, and 15 percent of those queries are ones we haven’t seen before--so we’ve built ways to return results for queries we can’t anticipate.

When people like you or I come to Search, we aren’t always quite sure about the best way to formulate a query. We might not know the right words to use, or how to spell something, because often times, we come to Search looking to learn--we don’t necessarily have the knowledge to begin with. 

At its core, Search is about understanding language. It’s our job to figure out what you’re searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how you spell or combine the words in your query. While we’ve continued to improve our language understanding capabilities over the years, we sometimes still don’t quite get it right, particularly with complex or conversational queries. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why people often use “keyword-ese,” typing strings of words that they think we’ll understand, but aren’t actually how they’d naturally ask a question. 

With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding--made possible by machine learning--we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.   .... "