OT: Google assistant/ "AI" ...

[Jethro_uk]

I recently grumbled about the "intelligence" displayed by Google Assistant, and the "AI" fad in general. I was a tad disparaging.

Last night, SWMBO was trying to remember a line from a poem, and - expecting disappointment - asked GA "read by ".

(Because her eyesight is f***ed, it's the "read" bit which helps).

To my mild astonishment, the top result was a YouTube clip of an actor reading it. *IF* Google had actually pressed "play" so it autostarted, it would have been brilliant.

So one step missed, but it was actually a help.

We are getting there ....

[Martin Brown]

Speech recognition still has a lot of embarrassing moments - there was a pretty good one last night. The AI obviously not a Newcastle fan:

Often it is partial phonetic matches across indistinctly delimited words of natural speech that cause the most chaos.

BTs landline txt to voice is amusing when faced with a phone number in the txt it reads the dial code with leading zero OK as digits but the main 6 digit number as P million Q hundred thousand...

[newshound]

I am frequently impressed at how quickly Google can find what I think of as relatively obscure facts, literary references, etc, as shown how "autofill" often suggests the appropriate full search based on only a small part of the query.

Like, "martin l" offers you Martin Luther and Martin Luther King while "martin g" offers you Martin guitars.

[Clive Arthur]

So that's Martin, king luthier?

Cheers

[Brian Gaff]

Yes The A word from Amazon can be quite good for things like that as well, and what it tends to do is read the best text output, ie no actors lovey. The problem with all of these devices is more to do with the fact that things they look up are seldom matched correctly in the search engines. Brian

[Jethro_uk]

It's more because they use keyword searching ... which can fool people when your sum total of data is small.

But now it's reached the size of a planet, keyword searching just drags back page after page of rubbish in the vain hop that just because they contain the 5 words you gave it, they will be right. Unfortunately, they ignore the *sense* of the 5 words.

And that's before you address the cruft of advertised results that waste time and screen estate.

Google may be missing a trick here. I'm sure there is a sizeable number of people who would happily pay a small sum oon subscription to have better search results without the skew of commercialism.

But then I'm the sort of person who thinks Sky et al are missing a trick by not offering a package where you *don't* get adverts....

[Huge]

Which is a very hard problem. "I went up the river in a canoe". Is the canoe in the river or the river in the canoe? In order to answer that you have to "know" what a canoe and a river are. There is (was) at least one project working on that, "Cyc";

There are probably others, but I don't know about them.

[Jethro_uk]

Exactly !

Will have a dig.

I'm confident there will be a solution. The commercial possibilities are immense. After all, if a search engine can *understand* what you are asking, it can actually find "intelligent" matches by parsing, rather than busily pulling back all pages with "" in, despite your search terms explicitly saying "that don't have ".

Personally, I think we are edging towards the "Google Event Horizon" where Googles usefulness is on a par with paper indexes and cross references unless something is done. The tell tale signs being how often you find Google has "amended" your search term to return results.

I'm still waiting for "knowledge engineer" to enter the lexicon, but effective and efficient searching is definitely a skill.

[Vir Campestris]

I used to be in the same office with some (until I quit a couple of months back). The guys who try to make the computer answer the questions that the voice recognition pulled out.

Andy