Google’s new search tool draws answers from book passages

Looking for inspiration on how to approach a certain topic? Or perhaps looking for something interesting to read? Google has a new search tool called Talk to Books to help you out. Futurist Ray Kurzweil sat down with TED curator Chris Anderson recently to talk about this new feature. It’s an artificial intelligence-powered tool where you can type in a question and it’ll scan over 100,000 volumes of books in Google Books and draw a list of likely responses with the relevant passage highlighted for you.

Kurzweil said this tool isn’t meant to replace keyword searches but makes use of “semantic search,” which uses the AI’s ability to understand natural human language. It theoretically handles queries better if you ask it things in sentence form because it tries to look for responses that look like something a person might say in a conversation. “Semantic search is based on searching meaning, rather than on keywords or phrases” elaborates Kurzweil on his blog. “Developed with machine learning, it uses ‘natural language understanding’ of words and phrases.” He was actually part of the team who launched “Smart Reply” for Gmail, which parses through an open email to give you a number of pre-written, and hopefully relevant, responses you can send back.

Source: Quartz