[microarchitect]

I was in Bangalore some weeks ago and I tried the query "OK google, directions to vidyarthi bhavan." And it worked perfectly. I was amazed!

The first thing that amazed me was that Google understood what I meant by vidyarthi bhavan! Note vidyarthi bhavan is a generic phrase in many Indian languages which just means 'student building.' In Bangalore, it refers to a specific restaurant in Gandhi Bazar famed for its masala dosas. And I bet there are plenty of people who live in Bangalore right now and don't know about this restaurant. The contextual knowledge here is amazing. And it wasn't just geolocation, I was about 15km away from Gandhi Bazar at that point. And Bangaloreans will know corresponds to an eternity given the traffic situation. And the software did all this by recognizing a phrase consisting of two words, both of which are not in English!

That moment was an epiphany for me, it the precise moment that I realized that personal digital assistants are here, and they actually work.

[glhaynes]

Sorry, but I think this is just Google Maps. Sitting here in the USA, typing "vidyarthi bhavan" into maps.google.com takes me to the one in Gandhi Bazar, too. Maybe because it has 155 reviews?

[MrHeartBroken]

Somebody wrote the following but it is gone now. (Still had it in my other tab.)

It's actually just plain old web search. Search this on Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=vidyarthi+bhavan) or Bing (http://www.bing.com/search?q=vidyarthi+bhavan) or DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vidyarthi+bhavan) or Blekko (http://blekko.com/#?q=vidyarthi%20bhavan) or Yandex (http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=vidyarthi%20bhavan) or Baidu (http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=vidyarthi+bhavan). Baidu is the only place where I saw it being the second result and not the first.

[brianpgordon]

Still, it's impressive that it can transcribe both English and non-English words without knowing beforehand which language will be used.