{"id":25264,"date":"2018-04-13T18:15:46","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T18:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/?p=312536"},"modified":"2018-04-17T02:37:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T02:37:17","slug":"google-announces-new-talk-to-books-semantic-search-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/2018\/04\/13\/google-announces-new-talk-to-books-semantic-search-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"Google announces new &lsquo;Talk to Books&rsquo; semantic-search feature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google announced today, April 13, 2018, a new experimental publicly available technology called <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/talktobooks\/\" >Talk to Books,<\/a> which lets you ask questions in plain-English sentences to discover relevant information from more than 100,000 books, comprising 600 million sentences.<\/p>\n<p>For example, if you ask, \u201cCan AIs have consciousness?,\u201d Talk to Books returns <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/talktobooks\/query?q=Can%20AIs%20have%20consciousness%3F\" >a list of books<\/a> that include information on that specific question.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=CWw2AAAAQBAJ&amp;source=ttb\" ><img style=' display: block; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;'  class=\"wp-image-312511 aligncenter\" title=\"Google Talk to Books \" src=\"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/images\/story-Google-Talk-to-Books-A11.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"508\" height=\"285\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The new feature was developed by a team at Google Research headed by Ray Kurzweil, a Google director of engineering. As Kurzweil and associates note in a <a href=\"https:\/\/research.googleblog.com\/2018\/04\/introducing-semantic-experiences-with.html\" >Google Research Blog post<\/a> today, \u201cWith <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/talktobooks\/\" >Talk to Books<\/a>, we\u2019re combining two powerful ideas: semantic search and a new way to discover books.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Experiments in understanding language<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Semantic search is based on searching <em>meaning<\/em>, rather than on keywords or phrases. Developed with machine learning, it uses \u201cnatural language understanding\u201d of words and phrases. Semantic search is explained further on Google\u2019s new \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/research.google.com\/semanticexperiences\/\" >Semantic Experiences<\/a>\u201d page, which includes a link to <a href=\"https:\/\/research.google.com\/semantris\/\" >Semantris<\/a>, a set of word-association games that lets you explore how Google\u2019s AI has learned to predict which words are semantically related.<\/p>\n<p>The new semantic-search feature is based on the research by Kurzweil and his team in developing an enhanced version of Google\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.kurzweilai.net\/how-googles-smart-reply-is-getting-smarter\" >smart reply<\/a>\u201d feature (which provides suggestions for responding to each of your Google emails), as explained in an <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1705.00652\" >arXiv paper<\/a> by Kurzweil\u2019s team.<\/p>\n<p>That research is further described in a <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1803.11175\" >March 29, 2018 arXiv paper<\/a>. Also released is a version of the underlying technology that will enable developers to use these new semantic-search tools &#8212; including a universal sentence encoder &#8212; in their own applications, similar to Talk to Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google announced today, April 13, 2018, a new experimental publicly available technology called Talk to Books, which lets you ask questions in plain-English sentences to discover relevant information from more than 100,000 books, comprising 600 million sentences. For example, if you ask, &ldquo;Can AIs have consciousness?,&rdquo; Talk to Books returns a list of books that [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":454,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,53,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-airobotics","category-internetcloudtelecom","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/454"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25265,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25264\/revisions\/25265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}