“Google has predicted its dominant web search engine will mean it will beat Apple in the race to turn the smartphone and other devices into intelligent, voice-controlled personal assistants,” Christopher Williams reports for The Telegraph.
“The rival technology giants are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in their competing services, Google Now and Siri, and the field is expected to be a major battleground for their mobile operating systems, Android and iOS,” Williams reports. “Both have teams of engineers working to crack the problems of making machines understand complex spoken questions and answer them in natural sentences. Google has said its goal is to create a service comparable to the computer of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek that will become a new way to interact with the web and myriad other apps.”
“Scott Huffman, the Google engineering director leading the effort, said the company had a headstart on its competition because the way it calculates the rankings of search results gives its systems an understanding of the meaning of how language is used in the real world,” Williams reports. “Apple has apparently recognised Google’s advantage. This month it paid more than US$200 million ($245 million) to acquire Topsy, a start-up focused on finding patterns in the 500 million tweets posted on Twitter every day. Observers, including Nick Halstead, chief executive of Topsy’s British rival DataSift, have speculated that Apple will use the language analysis technology to improve Siri’s understanding of queries before it processes them or delegates them to third-party web services.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s good to have goals.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James Wigg” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Apple’s $200 million for Topsy buys a lot of interesting things – December 4, 2013
With Topsy Labs acquisition, Apple gets rich Twitter data – December 3, 2013
Apple buys Twitter analytics startup Topsy Labs for $200 million – December 2, 2013