Google’s work in natural language understanding is getting better all the time – “Google today announced a pair of new artificial intelligence experiments from its research division that let web users dabble in semantics and natural language processing. For Google, a company that’s primary product is a search engine that traffics mostly in text, these advances in AI are integral to its business and to its goals of making software that can understand and parse elements of human language. The website will now house any interactive AI language tools, and Google is calling the collection Semantic Experiences. The primary sub-field of AI it’s showcasing is known as word vectors, a type of natural language understanding that maps “semantically similar phrases to nearby points based on equivalence, similarity or relatedness of ideas and language.” It’s a way to “enable algorithms to learn about the relationships between words, based on examples of actual language usage,” says Ray Kurzweil, notable futurist and director of engineering at Google Research, and product manager Rachel Bernstein in a blog post. Google has published its work on the topic in a paper here, and it’s also made a pre-trained module available on its TensorFlow platform for other researchers to experiment with.”

See Google Talk to Books – “Browse passages from books using experimental AI. Not a traditional search – Use this demo as a creativity tool to explore ideas and discover books by getting quotes that respond to your queries. Use natural language – Speaking to it in sentences will often get better results than keywords. That’s because the AI is trained on human conversations. Play with it – Try our sample queries then try your own. Experiment with different wording to see how it changes the results.”