Google is to build a supercomputer with the capability of talking back to its users, according to a report.
According to techupdates.com, Google could be a ‘Star Trek computer’, with the site claiming to have been following developments since Google first showed interest in the summer of 2010 and a company spokesman agreed to show it the advances in visual search and speech recognition technology it was developing.
Back then the spokesman equated the latest Android devices to a combination of the Star Trek’s Tricorder and USS enterprise’s computer.
Last year Scott Huffman, an engineering director on Google’s team, again invoked the supercomputer when he was asked how he envisioned picture voice search evolving.
“You would ask, ‘Hey Google, where should I have dinner?’ And it might say, ‘Well, you seem to like Italian restaurants, so how about this one?’” he said.
“Our vision is the Star Trek computer. You can talk to it — it understands you, and it can have a conversation with you,” Tamar Yehoshua, director of product management, told Farhad Manjoo.
Manjoo says that with increased follow-ups people working on the search engine have continued to mention the Star Trek computer, making it possible the company could really be in the process of creating one.
“For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding,” says head of Google search ranking team Amit Singhal.
“The destiny of [Google’s search engine] is to become that Star Trek computer, and that’s what we are building,” he adds.
It is however not certain how long the process will take, with many experts saying it will take years.
