Google has announced a new ‘Talk to Books’ feature which lets readers ask questions to a book and get replies through Artificial Intelligence. The new experiment will help users communicate with a book of their choice through machine learning and give replies on the question that’s relevant to the contents of the book.
Developed by its research division, the Semantics Experiences as Google calls it will help give answers by using a ‘natural language understanding’ of various phrases and words. Upon typing a question to ‘Talk to Books’, the AI tool will search across texts in over 100,000 books to answer your query which will be a list of possible output to the question asked.
Director of Engineering at Google Research, Ray Kurzweil said “With Talk to Books, we provide an entirely new way to explore books. You make a statement or ask a question, and the tool finds sentences in books that respond, with no dependence on keyword matching. In a sense you are talking to the books, getting responses which can help you determine if you’re interested in reading them or not”.
‘Talk to Books’ will thus help readers or budding writers to discover new books and help research on a specific content, which is sorted out among thousands of books. The AI tool will also suggest relevant books in the genre of your choice after you’re done reading with the current one, listing it according to authors and publishers who have a good rating. Users will also be able to cite from a specific passage without actually knowing which book or author it came from, thus allowing you to search for a book or a passage no matter how abstract it may seem.
Google’s new experiment would thus replace various sites in the world that force their own opinions while suggesting a book or genre. ‘Talk to books’ will help discover new books from authors you might not have heard of and could be useful when it comes to gathering ideas, get a new approach on an essay that might be working on or make it easy for you to search for the best quotes from a particular book.