[modeless]

> When I ask Google “Who did IBM’s Deep Blue system defeat?” and it gives me an infobox with the answer “Kasparov” in big letters, it has correctly understood my question. Of course this understanding is limited. If I follow up my question to Google with “When?”, it gives me the dictionary definition of “when” — it doesn’t interpret my question as part of a dialogue.

Google Search doesn't, but Google Assistant does. I posed the exact queries suggested by the article and the second query of simply the word "when" did give the correct answer (May 11 1997).

[cdirkx]

I remember that when my friend got a Google Home almost 2 years ago, I was asking it some questions to explore the limitations. I asked about a certain restaurant chain, and it gave me the information, but then I asked "is there one near me". It listed all places with "one" in the name near me.

I wonder if now it would correctly take the previous context into account. Google has been working a lot on improving their search and assistants to be "conversational". [1] looks like one of the results of this endevour.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs/contexts-overview

[baddox]

That example seems pretty unrelated to what I would think of as “understanding.” That’s more just a feature request for Siri.

It’s like saying “my calculator lets me type ’1 + 2 =’ and gives me the answer ‘3,’ so it seems to understand that question, but when I look at the calculator I see there’s no ‘sqrt’ button that would show me the square root of 3.”

The fact that my basic calculator doesn’t have a “sqrt” button is pretty irrelevant to how well it “understands” how to add two numbers together.

[taneq]

Your basic calculator still has a concept of context, though. If you go '1 + 2 =' then it will give you '3', and if you press '/ 2 =' then it will give you '1.5'. It 'remembers what you were talking about' within its very limited scope.

I think what they were trying to get at is that understanding is stateful.