Google's Future: Microphones in the Ceiling and Microchips in Your Head

"'I don't have a microchip in my head--yet,' says the man charged with transforming Google's relations with the technology giant's human users. But Scott Huffman does envisage a world in which Google microphones, embedded in the ceiling, listen to our conversations and interject verbal answers to whatever inquiry is posed. Huffman, Google's engineering director, leads a team tasked with making conversations with the search engine more reflective of the complex interactions people enjoy with each other. The future of the $300 billion business depends upon automatically predicting the search needs of users and then presenting them with the data they need. ... 'A microphone hanging from the ceiling, responding to verbal queries, would remove the need to whip out a phone to remind yourself what time tomorrow's flight leaves. ... Like a great personal assistant, it will interrupt you and say 'you've got to leave now.' Mr. Huffman said. ... 'I could ask my Google assistant where we should have lunch, that serves French food and isn't too expensive? Google will go ' Ok, we'll go to that place' and when I get in my car it should already be navigating to that restaurant. We're really excited by the idea of multiple devices being able to talk to each other.”... Google believes it can ultimately fulfil people's data needs by sending results directly to microchips implanted into its user's brains. Research has already begun with such chips to help disabled people steer their wheelchairs. ... His current priority is utilizing Google's Knowledge Graph, an expanding store of information holding 18 billion facts on 60 million subjects, to deliver a more 'human' search response. Voice-based search requests are more complex than the two-word searches typed into the search engine. 'My team is working very hard on the idea of a richer conversation with Google. We use a fairly complex linguistic structure in conversation that Google today doesn't understand. But five years from now we will be having that kind of conversation with Google and it will just seem natural. Google will answer you the same way a person would answer.'"

("Google's Future," The Independent, U.K., Dec. 17, 2013)

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