Summary: someone who is working on a product to search by speech and images issues a press release predicting that people will soon have half their searches being speech and images.
This idea of searching by speech or images seems ... uninspired. Claiming the interface will change and we'll search by speech or images is a linear progression from text searching.<p>How about framing the problem as proactive vs reactive searches? Piece together enough fragmented data about me to know what song I'll have stuck in my head and don't know the name of, recognize my email contains a course syllabus and auto-populate my calendar with assignments and study times... a million other proactive tasks all done with me in mind.<p>Geez these guys are talking about changing the interface... try and get rid of the interface all together!
Let's consider only "safe for work" Internet content:<p>Google/Bing have done well with keyword/phrase searching with results sorted by popularity and date.<p>Ng seems to be thinking that the big change will be having speech and images coming from the users as their input to the search process. My guess is that this will not be very important. I also guess that search for Internet content based on speech and images will become more important.<p>Yes, likely Ng can get a lot of pictures of what he knows to be, say, Ferraris and use some of them as the <i>training set</i> with a neural network to
identify Ferraris and test the training with the rest of the pictures. Okay. Maybe his neural network will be able to identify Ferraris. So, he could repeat this training for, say, 100,000 objects -- Fords, bread, airplanes, jewelery, Victorian houses, .... Maybe there will be some value there.<p>My view is that the future of Internet search is quite different.
I get why someone would think that speech is going to be more widely used: the computing world is moving to devices - phones and tablets - that are awkward to type on. Wearables (if they ever become a big thing) won't usually have a keyboard at all. I don't really see why picture searches would be that big.
I can see this happening in a couple of years, specially images since the world uploads thousand or even millions of images online. Then there is the whole face recognition software's that are not limited to people, places and things.
The problem with speech search is that talking can be disruptive.<p>But if they could do accurate speech recognition with a very quiet whisper (maybe using lip reading technology too) then I could see it completely dominating text searches in usage.
I'd get excited about image search technology if it could identify components of pictures (e.g. a red house, an angry cat, etc). This means that when I search for "happy family at beach" the search would actually look at the db of pics to find a) a family b) a beach and c) indications of happiness. That'd drastically cut my image search time down.<p>Text tags on images have a limit to the accuracy of the results.
I think that Andrew is making an easy prediction. Of course most search queries will be over voice or image.<p>My wife and I usually use speech input for web search on our phones. Also, the current Google image search is very nice. Have you tried using it? Go to Google image search and drag a photo to the text input field. I have used this to identify pictures of small mechanical parts and also to identify plants.
speech I can understand, but how does he figure pictures will be a huge way to search? There aren't that many times where I'm said to myself "I wish I could just take a picture to search for similar items".