Originally shared by Gideon Rosenblatt
Google Assistant: The Difference Between Knowing and Doing
As Google helps us to build “the containers of our collective intelligence,” one of the challenges is transforming the knowledge they contain into services that can be automated for us. This is the significance of Google’s Assistant.
Other important information will come as people ask the Assistant to perform actions for them. “In the search logs, we don’t see people asking to do things like, Book me a table at CasCal for 7 pm for two. Nobody’s going to say that to Google because Google is a search engine, right?” Pereira says. Actually, booking a table is one thing that Google Search can do, but that’s a rare exception: generally, Google search can give you answers, but can’t close the deal. So people don’t ask it to do things, and Google doesn’t get data on assistance. “That difference between knowing and doing is a big one,” says Pereira, “and only now are we only starting to get enough traffic and interaction to start understanding how we can make [an assistant] grow and become more robust, more general, more flexible. It’s going to be a long road to go from the information side where search comes from, to the doing side — to pervasive assistance.”
More on our “containers of our collective intelligence”:
http://www.the-vital-edge.com/machine-based-collective-intellige/
HT Eldon Edwards
https://backchannel.com/google-our-assistant-will-trigger-the-next-era-of-ai-3c72a4d7bc75#.risur0cxa
