Google AI will let you talk to books, play word association games

Google Research is giving us a (fun) glimpse of how far natural language processing in artificial intelligence has come. Mountain View’s research division has rolled out a couple of what it calls Semantic Experiences, which are websites with interesting activities that demonstrate AIs’ ability to understand how we speak.

One of the two experiences is called “Talk to Books” because, well, you can use the website to talk to books to a certain extent. You simply type in a statement or a question, and it will find whole sentences in books related to what you typed and other is and “Semantris” where people can play word association games powered by semantic search.

In “Talk to Books” experience, users can simply type in a statement or a question and the AI will find whole sentences in books related to what they have typed.

Google Research Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil and Product Manager Rachel Bernstein said the system does not depend on keyword matching. They trained its AI by feeding it a “billion conversation-like pairs of sentences,” so it can learn to identify what a good response looks like.

Google Research’s other new website called Semantris offers word association games, including a Tetris-like break-the-blocks experience. The two games can recognize both opposite and neighboring concepts, even sounds like “vroom” for motorcycle or “meow” for cat.

The development in word vector, an AI-training model that enables algorithms to learn relationships between words based on actual language usage, led to the advancement in natural language processing over the past few years.

Kurzweil and Bernstein said that these websites show how AIs’ “new capabilities can drive applications that were not possible before”.

They said other potential applications include “classification, semantic similarity, semantic clustering, whitelist applications (selecting the right response from many alternatives) and semantic search (of which Talk to Books is an example).”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been “betting big” on advances in AI and machine learning.

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