Use Google to Communicate With Books
If you’ve ever wanted to dig deeper into a printed page or browse your library of literature looking for answers to many of your questions, Google Talk to Books is a great way to do just that. It’s not a Google search for books , but it does offer more conversational answers to questions than traditional search.
For example, if you open Talk to Books and try any of the many pre-generated queries, such as “Who are the smartest characters in Harry Potter,” you won’t get a list of books that you could use to find the answer to your question. Instead, you will receive passages from books that are most likely to provide a natural answer to your question.
In this case, here is the main Google response to his Harry Potter query: “It is Lupine who recognizes Hermione’s intelligence during the Shrieking Hut scene in which the identities of Lupine and Sirius Black are fully revealed:” You are the smartest witch of all. ” your age I have ever met. “
While this answer doesn’t necessarily give you a summary of the “smartest” characters, you can make a decent list from the rest of Google’s answers (in bold):
- “Harry is recognized as a child prodigy”
- “Among adults, Professor McGonagall seems to reflect Hermione as an intelligent woman with a distinctly secondary status.”
- “Dumbledore is still considered an ‘all-knowing’ leader, and many times Professor McGonagall still asks Dumbledore for confirmation, even though she is still very smart and often shows it in novels.”
- “We see courage in the kindness of Hagrid and Hermione, as well as in Hermione’s willingness to stand up for herself and others.”
Aside from the last one, which seems a bit random, the answers seem to be in line with the general consensus that Harry and Dumbledore are pretty smart. This is a factual statement that you should never contact Maggie Smith.
As Google explains :
“Talk to Books is more a creative tool than a way to find specific answers. In this experiment, we are not considering whether the book is authoritative or on a topic. The model just looks at how well each proposal matches your request. Sometimes he finds answers that are not true or completely taken out of context. “
If you do decide to give Google Talk to Books a try, remember that this service is developed around semantic analysis, so you shouldn’t treat it like a regular Google search. Don’t enter keywords for which you want more information, and don’t try fancy search operators like “-Voldemort” to remove all mentions of an unnamed guy. Instead, phrase your questions as if you were about to ask a friend why they thought Frodo didn’t throw the ring at Mount Doom . You couldn’t just say to your friend, ” Frodo, Mount Doom, ” right?