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SALT LAKE CITY — Google has already tried to counter Apple's Siri with its Google Search app and Google Now, but now the company is taking a bigger leap into artificial intelligence.
Since Ray Kurzweil was named Director of Engineering at Google in December, he has dived into an artificial intelligence project that would ultimately be a Google user's "cybernetic friend."
Unlike Siri, Google's AI project aims to learn and know what the user will need before they ask for it. When the product is called on, the user will get a comprehensive answer based on history, interests and activities. Instead of understanding the question as a string of literal words, Google's AI will aim to have a deeper understanding of the meaning.
"It is ambitious. In fact there is no more important project than understanding intelligence and recreating it," said Kurzweil in an interview with Singularity Hub. "This is obviously not the only project in the world to do with artificial intelligence, but I do envision a fundamental approach based on everything we understand about how the human brain does it."
The AI product will be designed to skim and analyze information, then bring the user information they need or would find interesting. Kurzweil even suggested it could listen in on phone conversations, analyze emails and look at schedules to predict what users need. He gave the example of rerouting a user's commute if it knew there was an accident close to an appointment. It could even update departure time if it foresees a delay.
However, one of the biggest challenges with this project is teaching a computer how to understand human language
"The project we plan to do is focused on natural language understanding," said Kurzweil. "We want to give computers the ability to understand the language that they're reading."
He pointed to the example of blog posts: they're not just words on a screen, but they're meant to convey something. It's that overall message that computers haven't been able to pick up on yet.
Kurzweil said the AI project could be applied to Google's current services and options, like its language translator. Understanding a message rather than the simple word mechanics could make the translator function even more accurate. However, the immediate goal is to apply it to Google's core products, like search and question and answering.
I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It'll just know this is something that you're going to want to see.
–Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google
Some have accused Kurzweil's ideas on using brain secrets to unlock the key to artificial intelligence have been as doing the exact opposite.
"(They) reverse engineer his own companies' computer systems in order to propose a theory about how the mind works," wrote Gary Marcus of the New Yorker in an article about Kurzweil's book, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed."
However, it's no secret that Google plans to stay head-to-head with Apple's products and services. They've made that clear with Google Now, an app not unlike Siri that can respond to voice commands and queries. But while Siri does third party searches for results, Google Now goes directly to Google itself.
Like the Kurzweil's AI project, and other Google inventions, Google Now simply builds on the company's core products to improve the other services.
"The best thing about Google Now is that it uses every system that Google has built in the last 10 years. It touches almost every back-end system at Google," said Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android, in a Technology Review interview. The result, he added, is an "increase in a person's tranquility, as opposed to having to install an app or do a search or open the browser to navigate to a webpage."
