I knew I was easily pleased but did not quite realize how easily pleased. I found out this morning with Google’s latest magic trick of Voice Search. It is, as the name suggests, a way of searching by speaking to Google rather than writing.
Unlike how the apes respond to the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, I responded to Google Voice Search without any hesitation or circumspection or philosophical doubt whatsoever. To test how how good the new search tool is I sang a Hindi song into my computer’s microphone. The song was “Mein to tum sang nain mila ke” (Lata Mangeshkar, ‘Man Mauji’, 1962). Google Voice Search interpreted that as “magpul ms symptoms manmohan singh.”
I then tried my own name which it got perfectly. To conclude my morning aping around I said “Uncertainty Principle” and the tool picked it up instantly. Three out of two with my accent, which I consider globally neutral, is not bad at all. I cannot possibly fault the tool for mucking up the song.
Unable to resist, I tried Maqbool Fida Husain and it heard it as “bubbles fedora send.” To think that Google knows Mayank Chhaya more than Maqbool Fida Husain, while uplifting, is simultaneously disturbing. What’s happening here is that many variables kick in in terms of my intonation, the complexity of the search and perhaps even the ambient noise. I tried the same search again and I got this: “bubble sabella listen.”
I am sure Google will fine-tune these challenges but as a tool it is quite an accomplishment. I can already see Iris recognition in the not too distant a future. You could look into your webcam and Google or someone like it would tell you what is going on in your mind. Reading a man’s mind would be easy for that tool for obvious reasons. It is a woman’s mind that would severely test all its algorithmic strength.
It is strange that I should have mentioned ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in the beginning of my post because one of the themes of the movie is the attempted takeover of the spaceship by its computer HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer and hence HAL). Of course, Google would not do something like that. Would it now? It is not evil after all.
