last friday, google introduced “talk to books,” a new tool that uses semantic search (search based on meaning, rather than mere keywords) and is powered by the same google conversational ai that is used to implement “smart” email responses to provide a whole new way to browse books.
what happens when, for the first time in human history, books can be searched at the sentence level, instead of the author or subject level?
You are reading: Google talk to books
Using this tool, a user can enter a statement or a question, and Talk to Books searches over 100,000 books for the sentences that best provide an answer. no reliance on keyword matching.
This is not some fancy new thing launched by Google that will go largely unnoticed: this is a deep, almost shocking development that will have wide-ranging implications for all publishers, from day one:
1) book discoverability just became a conversation
How do we discover a book? a friend tells us about it. a news source tells us about it. a family member tells us, etc. now we can add a new one: a conversational ai tells us. discoverability is the problem this tool really helps solve.
Google’s developer notes explain that a “popularity measure” has been implemented that provides a boost to books produced by “professional” publishers, but the tool itself is intentionally left unfiltered to demonstrate its raw power.
2) voice technology first is the delivery system
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When people ask google what books they should read next, they won’t be doing it at all on a touchscreen mobile device, and they certainly won’t be using a qwerty keyboard on a desktop computer. rather, they will use their own voice and speak to a computer.
expect that talk to books will be quickly integrated into google assistant and available through google home devices, enabling this web tool’s semantic search capability to inform conversational search results delivered to through voice.
3) what about traditional booksellers?
The bookstores would have to adapt, once again, and offer something else, because I don’t buy books from them… I buy from the artificial intelligence that knows my context, that knows the publishing universe and that can speak. for me to fluently be armed with both.
4) this development instantly affects all other forms of media
many people and organizations thrive on selling books, while making other types of content, like podcasts or videos, free to cultivate audiences who can then be marketed to buy those books.
if an ai tells me which books to buy next, that same ai needs to know where to find other content by that author, that publisher, or similar authors and publishers. So, in other words, you need to make sure your podcasts are available through Google Play Music, your audiobooks are available in the Google ecosystem, and your videos are available and searchable well on YouTube, if you’re aiming to sell a lot of books.
5) google hit a home run by making the underlying code of “talk to books” open source
Countless applications can be created using this technology in different contexts, from larger publishers applying this to their own book inventories to gain various insights, to members of the media using this technology to search for subject matter experts semantically, to schools that could use this technology to expand or update curricula, and so on. it will be exciting to see what is built on this.
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The full unabridged version of this blog post first appeared on the digital book world site. Bradley Metrock produced the iBooks Authors Conference from 2015 to 2017, before Score Publishing acquired Digital Book World, and has authored many articles on the state of the publishing industry and recent trends.
further reading:
google: google talk to books
lifehacker: uses google to ‘talk’ to books
On the Verge: Google’s latest AI experiments let you talk to books and test your word association skills
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