The rise of personal assistants and the death of the search box

Columnist Eric Enge recaps the SMX West 2016 keynote by Googler Behshad Behzadi, who envisions a not-too-distant future in which voice search becomes more ubiquitous -- and may even replace the search box.

On March 1, Behshad Behzadi, Google’s director of conversational search, gave a keynote address at SMX West in San Jose. This keynote was loaded with insight into Google’s perspective on where search is today, and where it’s going.

In today’s column, I’m going to provide a review of some of the things I took out of the keynote, then offer my thoughts on what the future holds. In short, I’m going to outline why this spells impending doom for the concept of a “search box.”

We actually got some initial insight into this right at the beginning of the keynote. Google’s goal is to emulate the “Star Trek” computer, which allowed users to have conversations with the computer while accessing all of the world’s information at the same time. Here is an example clip showing a typical interaction between Captain Kirk and that computer:

Behzadi also showed a clip from the movie, “Her,” and noted that “Star Trek” was imagining a future 200-plus years away (the show originally aired in the 1960s), and “Her” was envisioning a future just over 20 years away. Behzadi, on the other hand, believes that this will unfold in less than 20 years.

Google timeline

A quick history review will show us just how rapidly Google has changed over the years:

In addition, the growth of Google’s Knowledge Graph has been prolific:

Another key driver of change is that we will continue to get more and more devices to speak to at home:

As a result of this, users will get increasingly comfortable speaking to computers, and this will drive an increase in natural language usage in search queries.

Another thing driving this increased natural language usage is the improvement in speech recognition quality. According to Behzadi, today, the speech recognition error rate is down to eight percent, whereas two years ago, it was at 25 percent. Note that for more than 30 minutes of his keynote, he was continually doing voice demos, and not a single recognition error occurred.

Some other key points about the growth of voice search:

1. Voice search is currently growing faster than typed search.
2. There are many times where voice is the best way to interact (driving, cooking).
3. It’s becoming more and more acceptable to talk to a phone, even in groups.

During the live video keynote event I did with Gary Illyes, he told me that the number of voice queries in 2015 was double that in 2014. Illyes also told me that voice queries were 30 times more likely to be action-oriented than typed queries.

The other major implication of the move to voice search is that it takes search out of the standard practice of going to a web page and typing in a query. Access to voice search needs to be ubiquitous, not require you to go to a special place to do it.

The future of search is to build the ultimate assistant

This is what Behzadi told us, and this idea that search should be the ultimate assistant is a fascinating conceptualization of where things are going. It has many, many implications.

Here is how Behzadi characterized some of the ways that Google thinks about this in a mobile-first world:

Mobile Attributes:

• Knowledge About the World
• Knowledge About You and Your World
• Knowledge About Your Current Context

Your Assistant Needs to Be There:

• Whenever You Need
• Whenever You Are
• To Help You Get Things Done

In case you’re wondering how well people will adapt to this notion of living via their personal assistant, my college-age children are already a good part of the way there, as is my 81-year-old mother-in-law. As more capability comes along, they will go right along with it.

Illustrating with examples

Behzadi is confident that Google is making great strides toward these goals, and he provided a whole series of interesting demos of the progress Google has made.

Parsing complicated natural language

He provided many examples of this, but the one that stood out for me was this query:

“Can you tell me how is the, what was the score of the last game with Arsenal?” You can see the result here:

As you can see, during the query, when I repeated it on my phone, I changed the direction of the sentence in the middle. Google was able to parse that down to an understanding that the real question started in the second half of the malformed sentence.

App integration

Another interesting demo was of the degree of App integration. At one point, Behzadi opened Viber, which is an instant messaging and VoIP app, and showed a dialogue that he was having with coworker about dinner.

One restaurant they referred to in the dialogue was CasCal, which is a tapas bar in Mountain View. So then he said, “OK Google” and asked, “how far is it?” Google provided the answer.

Next he said, “Call CasCal.”

For demo purposes, he then hung up, as he really didn’t want to chat with CasCal in the middle of his keynote, but he then followed that with the query, “book a table for 8 p.m. Friday for five people,” which launched the OpenTable App.

Lastly, he asked the Google app to “navigate to CasCal restaurant,” which opened up Google Maps.

This type of integration goes through some very complex interactions to address a fairly basic human need. Currently, Google is only integrated with about 100 apps currently, but the number is growing.

Google is clearly focusing on the most popular apps, too. For example, Behzadi did another demo showing integrations with Facebook and WhatsApp that was pretty cool.

Understanding context

There were also a few interesting demos with regard to understanding context. In one, he started with the query “how high is rigi.” However, given that he was standing in San Jose at the moment, this was heard as “how high is ricky,” and something like this screen shot came back: