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April 25, 2013

Google's Ray Kurzweil Says Emotional Understanding is Next Step for Search

By Rory Lidstone, TMCnet Contributing Writer

Google (News - Alert) is a company that always tries to innovate and improve. But when it comes to the company's core search service, how much better can it really get? It already predicts what users want to search for with a decent amount of accuracy, features integration with a number of Google's other services and can even search by image instead of text. So, where else can Google search possibly go?



According to Ray Kurzweil, the next step is understanding human emotions.

Kurzweil, who joined Google at the end of last year as director of engineering, is probably best known for creating the first text-to-speech software and has been described as both a futurist and "the ultimate thinking machine." So, his assertion that emotions are the next step in Web search evolution might not be as out there as it seems. Indeed, he sees deeper understanding of semantic content and emotion as entirely within the realm of possibility.

"Search has moved beyond just finding keywords, but it still doesn't read all these billions of web pages and book pages for semantic content," said Kurzweil in a recent interview. "If you write a blog post, you've got something to say, you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning. If that happens, and I believe that it's feasible, people could ask more complex questions."

If Kurzweil does actually produce such a system, however, the implications go far beyond improved search functionality into a realm many may find uncomfortable. Many people already have an issue with the amount privacy the Internet provides. Imagine the outcry if Google search was able to more or less know who each user is.

Of course, even with Kurzweil at the helm of the project, providing computers with emotional intelligence is still a long way off — sort of. According to Kurzweil the gap between humans and computers in terms of emotional understanding will be closed by 2029.




Edited by Blaise McNamee
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