I love Star Trek. I’m not a “Trecky,” ok? Those people have way too much free time and, according to Urban Dictionary, end up living in their mom’s basement until they’re 35. But, I always loved the original version of the show. I particularly like how they use their computers with a purely voice-activated method, basically engaging in a conversation with the machine to get answers to pressing questions.
Last week I wrote about how I need to start treating my mouse with more respect, at least until I could operate my computer like Spock. This was at the end of my shout out to the inventor of the mouse, who recently passed on at the age of 88. In that article, I linked to this article about Google’s continuing work on voice-activated search.
Chrome already has a voice search function. But, the folks at Google are working hard on improving voice search and adding the ability for it to talk back to the user and for this function to be available on any of your devices, your home computer or your mobile device.
It’s been referred to as “conversational search,” designed to do more than kick out an audio answer to the user. It’s supposed to understand less formal, more conversational language, like the use of pronouns and the ability to understand users’ references back to previous questions and points in a conversation. In other word, it’s supposed to understand you, when you engage it in a conversation like you would an actual person. Here’s a link to the Google blog post from the day they announced it at Google I/O.
According to early reviews, the conversational voice search function still has a lot of bugs. When it gets confused, it apparently responds by providing the user with links instead of a verbal reply. So, in that sense it’s not too much different than Suri — at least in regard to its fallacies.
But it’s still a leap over what was previously available. I’ll still need my mouse though. In the meantime, I plan to test out the voice search and report back. Stay tuned.
