Google's Universal Assistant & Ambient Computing To Change Search As We Know It
Google's Universal Assistant & Ambient Computing To Change Search As We Know It
by Barry Schwartz
| Filed Under Google Search Engine
TIME has this great piece on Google Now
and a prototype of the communicator that Captain Picard and company
use to interact with the Enterprise on Google's search czar Amit
Singhal. It is basically something you tap, ask a question, get an
answer.
What I found more interesting was a post on Google+
by Google's Yonatan Zunger, the Chief Architect for Social at Google,
but who now is working full time on what he is calling and I assume what
Google is calling "the universal assistant." He said "for the past
several months, I've been focusing on this full-time, and this is what I
expect to be spending the next several years on: making "ambient
computing." He defined ambient computing as "computing that is
seamlessly present wherever you are, so easily accessible that you
barely even realize that you're interacting with a computer -- a
worldwide reality."
So we've seen baby steps towards this with
Google's Knowledge graph, featured snippets, answers, etc. More so with
Google mobile searches, voice search especially and the creepy way
Google Now shows you answers before you want it. But it is going to get
big in the upcoming years.
Yonatan said, "simply searching for
web pages isn't what people want, nowadays: they want to be able to talk
into their computer (or into their phone, or simply speak into the
void) and have it understand what they mean, what they want, and make it
happen." Adding "we have to go far beyond simple things like search:
we have to have systems that make it easy for people to interact with
and extend the assistant to do everything conceivable." "That's where
I'm spending my time, and I'm looking forward to being able to tell
people more in the future," Yonatan Zunger said.
You know, we all
know this is coming but it seems like right now, it is at our footsteps.
It is an amazing thing to be able to solve and it will never be 100%
but it is getting so close and so much more powerful that it is scary.
Scary not just in terms of the technology and how far it has come but it
has to be a concern for those ten blue links and how (a) SEOs can
monetize them and (b) how Google will monetize them (i.e. AdWords).
Either
way, there are lots of smart people out there both on the SEO front and
in the AdWords team and I am sure they will figure out ways. The team
working on this at Google has no care on how anyone will monetize it,
which is pretty cool.
Forum discussion at Google+.
Photo credit to TIME magazine.
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