You can now talk to your computer, kind of like you would a person -- that is, if you're running Google's Chrome browser. The conversational search abilities that Google showed off last week at its I/O developer conference are now live.
Although Chrome's voice search, which allows users to search for things just by speaking, has been around for a while, the update now lets your computer speak back to you. For example, if you asked, "Who is the prime minister of Canada?", Chrome will say out loud, "The prime minister of Canada is Stephen Harper."
In theory, conversational search also lets you ask natural-language follow-up questions to Chrome such as, "Where does he live?" or "What year did he take office?" (Note the pronouns.) Chrome should respond with those answers verbally, assuming your computer's microphone is working properly.
In practice, though, it's not nearly this seamless. I tried out Google's conversational search at the I/O conference, and Chrome is a lousy conversationalist. Even when it heard my follow-ups correctly, it typically spat back a list of links.
The same is true today. When I tried asking some simple follow-up questions to basic queries about world figures and locations, Chrome very rarely responded verbally at all. Only when I retreated to a super-easy question chain -- "Who is Barack Obama?" and "How tall is he?" -- did Chrome speak back to me for the second question.
However, for single-question searches that have clear right answers, conversational search works pretty well. When asked, "What's the atomic mass of plutonium?", Google can tell you it's 244u in a soothing female voice. Although you can turn off voice replies in Google settings, there doesn't seem to be a way to change the sound of the voice. The feature also only works in English for now.
Have you tried Chrome conversational search? How do you like it? Let us know in the comments.
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