Search as AI, and fundamentally conversation, putting it all together. Google started with search, while the assistant providers started with the conversation. Moving in the right direction.
Google isn’t ready to turn search into a conversation
Despite Google’s whizzy AI demos at I/O, search is still served best by text By James Vincent
The future of search is a conversation — at least, according to Google.
It’s a pitch the company has been making for years, and it was the centerpiece of last week’s I/O developer conference. There, the company demoed two “groundbreaking” AI systems — LaMDA and MUM — that it hopes, one day, to integrate into all its products. To show off its potential, Google had LaMDA speak as the dwarf planet Pluto, answering questions about the celestial body’s environment and its flyby from the New Horizons probe.
GOOGLE’S DREAM IS TO SPEAK AND THE MACHINE WILL ANSWER
As this tech is adopted, users will be able to “talk to Google”: using natural language to retrieve information from the web or their personal archives of messages, calendar appointments, photos, and more.
This is more than just marketing for Google. The company has evidently been contemplating what would be a major shift to its core product for years. A recent research paper from a quartet of Google engineers titled “Rethinking Search” asks exactly this: is it time to replace “classical” search engines, which provide information by ranking webpages, with AI language models that deliver these answers directly instead?
There are two questions to ask here. First is can it be done? After years of slow but definite progress, are computers really ready to understand all the nuances of human speech? And secondly, should it be done? What happens to Google if the company leaves classical search behind? Appropriately enough, neither question has a simple answer. ...
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