Have you seen the commercials for the new Google app that is like Siri? It’s actually called Google Now and, like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, it is a voice-recognizing search app. Apparently, there are also other apps like Hound which are crazy-advanced and can answer much more complex questions than any of the aforementioned apps, but let’s just stick with the general idea of “conversational search” and continue to be blown away by it.
Conversational search understands what you are THINKING, man. Well, not really, but it certainly omits the need to type keywords or search terms into a search engine to receive a long and varied list of possibly related websites or articles. This could, eventually (probably not so eventually), change the way SEO works on Google and other search engines, but let’s not worry about that yet, either. The big difference between the original search engine and this new technology is the fact that the app can “understand” conversational, and sometimes very unclear, human speech. That’s crazy. The technology can also build on previous questions and branch out from there in the following searches; for example, if you ask a question about what time it is in Paris, and then ask about train stations, the app will answer your question and then give you results for train stations in Paris. That is just one example, but the app “remembers” the line of questioning and adapts the subsequent searches, rather than the user having to make the keyword connections and modify the search.
Siri doesn’t yet have this conversational element, but for all you diehard Siri lovers out there, she is better for productivity; with things like scheduling meetings, for example. It will probably be updated and improved to include this conversational element sometime in the near future to compete with other AI personal assistants.
What have we come to? Can’t we even TYPE a question anymore? Ellen Degeneres has an important point to make about our convenience addiction: Check out 11:52 and on – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8jHAMaTEug (do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing when you have time- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W9JZkHdCdA)
Touché, Ellen.
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