Google has rolled out a big upgrade for its voice search, enabling it to understand and answer even complex questions. With the recent development, the Mountain View tech firm skyrockets to the top of the virtual voice assistant competition, gaining the upper hand over Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana.
Google started its voice search in 2008 and advanced its capabilities with the Knowledge Graph in 2012. It began with answering simple queries, providing information about single entities, such as a famous person, a well-known event and many others.
Based on its track record, Google's voice search has done a pretty bang-up job in recognizing and understanding questions as well as answering them accurately. With the upcoming update, it will actually understand the meaning behind the inquiries too, including better comprehension of superlatives, questions about particular points in time and complex combinations.
Along with the superlatives, Google can now understand ordered items, yielding results of who or what subjects are really the tallest, largest and smallest, to name a few samples, in an arranged manner. Take this question for example: Who are the tallest Chicago Bulls players?
Now, regarding the questions about particular points in time, Google will be able to provide time-accurate and comprehensive results. For instance, it can now answer the question "What songs did Nirvana record in 1989?" and bring up a whole list of the songs Nirvana recorded in that year.
Last up, Google can now comprehend some complex combinations, actually understanding the context of sentences. It can now respond to the inquiry "What are some of Jaden Smith's father's movies?" and offer links to Will Smith's works.
According to Satyajeet Salgar, product manager at Google, it's still not perfect, though.
"We're still growing and learning, which means we make mistakes. Ask Google 'Who was Dakota Johnson's mom in the movie?', and we'll respond with the movies of Dakota Johnson's real-life mother Melanie Griffith, not the actor Jennifer Ehle who played Anastasia's mother Carla in the 50 Shades of Grey movie. (Hey, that one's tricky even for people!)," he says via a blog post.
Before this update went official, Google treats search inquiries based on their keywords, not on the context. To put it differently, it will only yield results that match the words used rather than answering the question itself.
With what we've seen right now, Google just filled a tall voice-search order right there.
Take a look at the videos below to get an even better idea of what Google has in mind.
