Nice idea. But the demos are disappointing. The promotional video is awful. Talking heads and stock shots of a server farm. Please.
The demo video is better. But the question answerer seems rather dumb. There's no indication that it has any context; that is, it doesn't seem to use what you said previously in any useful way. The screen message for the recognition of the Empire State Building says "Parsed metadata", so they may have not actually recognized the image at all. Also, answering "Where is the Empire State Building" with "New York" is not particularly useful if you need directions.
Context is the hard problem. Without conversational context, it's like having voice input to a search engine. If you don't get the answer you want, you have to ask a new question, treated independently of the original one. You can't continue the conversation in the area of interest.
It seems to me that what you really want is proper implementation of coreference resolution [1]. This is extremely hard and extremely poorly done so far. Perhaps with more open sourcing, the problem would be more widely tackled. Or perhaps not.
Comments
Nice idea. But the demos are disappointing. The promotional video is awful. Talking heads and stock shots of a server farm. Please.
The demo video is better. But the question answerer seems rather dumb. There's no indication that it has any context; that is, it doesn't seem to use what you said previously in any useful way. The screen message for the recognition of the Empire State Building says "Parsed metadata", so they may have not actually recognized the image at all. Also, answering "Where is the Empire State Building" with "New York" is not particularly useful if you need directions.
Context is the hard problem. Without conversational context, it's like having voice input to a search engine. If you don't get the answer you want, you have to ask a new question, treated independently of the original one. You can't continue the conversation in the area of interest.
It seems to me that what you really want is proper implementation of coreference resolution [1]. This is extremely hard and extremely poorly done so far. Perhaps with more open sourcing, the problem would be more widely tackled. Or perhaps not.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreference#Coreference_resolut...
Coreference resolution is a start. You need that just to disambiguate questions.
I wonder how well Hello Barbie does at this.