Google’s Conversational Voice Search Activated on Chrome

Danica Radovanovic — Fri, 24 May 2013 08:11:46 +0000

If you remember the article Conversations with Google, you may recall it’s been predicted that the next mode of interaction with Google search will be natural language conversation where Google will be able to follow the course of the conversation and provide new results and suggestions. Well, as of this Wednesday it’s become a reality.

Google presented conversational voice search at Google I/O a week ago. It’s a kind of search designed to be more like natural language and human speech than the technically constructed search inquiries that people use daily to retrieve information. You can just click the microphone in the search box, ask your question in a natural way, and get spoken answers. Conversational voice search is not a Chrome desktop version of Google Now, even if it might look like that; it has none of the predictive answers that Google Now provides.

The conversational search feature has a natural language and semantic search integrated into it, and after the initial testing yesterday while it’s far from perfect, it presents one of those significant changes. Speaking your search into the box is not a new thing, but having a conversation with the search engine and being able to search by voice is what makes the difference in the human-computer interaction. And being able to speak a search inquiry and getting an answer read back to you is pretty impressive. The feature is similar to how the Google Search App works for the iPhone or Android.

As a test, I asked “Who invented the World Wide Web?”

The Chrome voice feature responded with correct answer, “Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau…”.

Conversational voice search does not always work right as you go further on into a conversation. Chrome didn’t follow up with voice feedback on questions “Where the World Wide Web was invented?”. Other search inquiries such as “who is Sally Ride?” include voice feedback “According to Wikipedia…” and then Chrome provides a brief synopsis.

For another test, a simple weather related inquiry, I asked, “What’s the weather like in Paris?” and then “Do I need umbrella for the weekend in Paris?”. I got back a full spoken report of today’s weather, along with a forecast for this weekend. What is really impressive is that you can continue with voice search by asking further questions in a way you could never do with regular search (i.e. you can use other references from previous inquiry).

While not yet perfect, conversational search is still very appealing; we’ll see how this feature will be developed by engineers. The conversational search question-and-answer feature is now available to users of the latest version of Chrome 27 browser, which Google released this Tuesday.

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Google Gets an Upgrade

Dan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:05:24 +0000

According to Google’s Grzegorz Czajkowski, many of the things people are involved in can be represented in the form of graph, including professional activities and personal relationships. The company was the first to use advanced graph analysis methods like PageRank to get more from the Web.

Using graphs in a dynamic environment like the society brings a new angle to computational power and scalability. Google applies the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model in its scalable graph analysis by using a framework known as Pregel. Pregel simplifies the calculation of PageRank and scales clusters autonomously without requiring programmers to intervene manually. As a result, the software engineers have more time to concentrate on the algorithm itself.

The Basics of PageRank

PageRank uses the random suffer model that assumes that Web surfers use a linear method when following links until their interests stop or they stop browsing. All the clicks away from the source documents reduce the PageRank. Of course, the actual process is more complex, with the typical value of PageRank dampening being 0.15.

The entire Web can be treated like a graph, where all the pages and index-able files are regarded as ‘vertices’ and the links as ‘edges.’
The vertices are usually initialised with starting values that, interestingly, make no major influence on the end-result. Pregel runs
through a series of super-steps after initialisation by updating values and sending messages to other vertices.

Related Frameworks and Methodologies

According to Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea, there’s more behind Pregel and Google, which uses other techniques like FlumeJava and Dremel. The company uses Pregel because it is ‘expressive’ and easy to program.
Software engineers have designed their own frameworks and toolkits, especially when dealing with multi-step graph operations.

Characteristics and Benefits of Dremel

Nested data

Interactive speed

Trillion-record, multi-terabyte datasets

Columnar processing and storage

Aggregation tree architecture

Spam analysis

Analysing crawled Web documents

In situ data access

Crash reporting for Google Products

OCR results from Google Books

Tracking the install of Android Market apps

Resource monitoring for work run in Google’s data centres

Debugging map tiles on Google Maps

FlumeJava

Google users started using FlumeJava in May 2009. It is simpler than MapReduce and can control executor and optimizer if necessary. Hundreds of people use pipelines with processing capacities ranging from gigabytes to petabytes every month.
Google employs interchangeable tools and systems that multiple groups can use.

References:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2261
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1201/1201.2261.pdf
http://arxiv.org/a/petrovic_d_1

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google search – Australian Science

Google’s Conversational Voice Search Activated on Chrome

Google Gets an Upgrade