Google Plans To Turn Search into A Personal Assistant

The phrase “Google it” has become part of our common language, proving just how much of an impact Google has had. Forever moving forward, the company is always planning the next big thing and earlier this month at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Engineering Director for Google, Scott Huffman, outlined the company’s plans for the future of search.

Google knows that things don’t stay the same forever, with peoples’ expectations changing and evolving. According to Huffman, the company want to move away from the traditional looking search results and create something that looks smarter and that actually looks more like a personal assistant. In fact, Huffman even said that in his view Google’s goal is to create the ultimate personal assistant. He said in the future searching will be about making  “all your tasks as you go through the day simpler and quicker.”

The company want to create a search experience that more resembles interaction and conversation. It has been working on a type of back-and-forth conversation for a while and with the use of Knowledge Graph, Google is improving at finding out what its users’ intentions are. The combination of voice recognition and the fact that Google Now can handle 38 languages and knows more than 18 billion facts along with the connections, is what will build the Google Search of the future.
Taking the concept even further, it could be that any interactions will not neccessarily need a screen. Huffman feels that the car is a fantastic opportunity for the new style Google Search. He also thinks it would work well in a living room, where microphones and speakers could wait for your “ok Google” command.
Huffman stressed that for all of this to work, the ultimate assistant needs to do more than converse and that’s where Google Now plays its part. Knowing your habits, preferences and reservations, which can be discovered through a Gmail inbox, is what will create the ultimate personal assistant.
At the moment Google is working on how to build on top of this platform and is looking at how to overcome “lots of tricky questions”. It could be that we see it opened up for developers but however Google achieves the ultimate Search, the future certainly looks interesting.

[IMAGE & SOURCE via: http://techbeat.com/2013/12/google-plans-to-turn-search-into-a-personal-assistant/]