This is hard stuff. This is natural language processing, the ability for a search engine to really understand what a sentence is about, coupled with semantic search, the idea that facts and pages are all connected together in ways that aren’t immediately visible but understood behind-the-scenes.

One step closer to a real robot assistant you can talk with!

Having A Conversation That’s cool and impressive, speaking a search and getting an answer read back to you. But that’s not the real magic. What’s really special is that you can continue your search “conversation” by asking further questions in a way you could never do with regular search, by making use of pronouns and other shortcuts that reference things in your previous query.

For example, after doing the search above, I asked, “how tall is he” and got back this:

“Barack Obama is six feet one inch tall,” came back the spoken response, along with a text answer. But I hadn’t asked how tall Barack Obama was. I’d asked, “How tall is he.” Google smartly figured out the “he” I was talking about was Barack Obama.

Humans understand this easily. We talk to each other, and we keep track of what we say to each other in a conversation, usually keeping all the antecedents — pronouns and shortcut references to previous things — straight. But search engines typically have no memory like this. They’ve generally treated each search we do as if it is unconnected to the previous one.

One step closer to the Singularity?

Yes, I think so.

Imagine if our brains could interact with Google without having to talk.

That would accelerate things.