
Talk to Books - tristanho
https://books.google.com/talktobooks/
======
m52go
This is cool! Not sure how practically useful it is (don't Google search
results already include results from books?) but it seems like one of those
things that could be super powerful once a good application is found for it.

To be honest, I'm just relieved Google seems to be doing something new with
Google Books.

I've been fearing they'd take down Google Books (or severely hobble it) since
it looks like it's been stagnant for years now (actually less than stagnant,
since it seems like they took away Popular Passages? I really miss that!).

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telesilla
>I've been fearing they'd take down Google Books

Oh that would be terrible. Google Books is extremely useful for academic work:
not every library has good text search and I often found myself using Google
Books to get reference material I could then look up in the library for full
access.

~~~
clw8
I'm just an armchair historical linguist but the 19th century books and
dictionaries written by British missionaries dispatched to China, that are
freely available in abundance on Google Books, are just as fascinating as the
cutting-edge monographs of the past decade. They lacked proper training but
their observations are fascinating. For example, the pronunciation guide in a
dictionary of Shanghainese notes that older people would say Beiging (I'm
going to avoid linguistics jargon and true Shanghainese pronunciation for the
sake of understandability) and younger people would say Beijing. So we know
exactly when this sound change (palatalization) spread to the Shanghai area.
The author didn't call it as such and seemed to have the attitude of "kids
these days don't talk properly" which makes it really amusing to read.

~~~
panzerklein
That sounds interesting. Could you provide a couple of links to those books?

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abc_lisper
So, google, "what's fun about programming"

The first result says this

Similarly, programming a computer can prove fun because you might design a
simple program that displays your boss’s ugly face on the computer

LOL.

~~~
baddash
lol, didn't see that result. where was it from?

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abc_lisper
It’s on the linked page at bottom

[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=What%20is%20fun...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=What%20is%20fun%20about%20computer%20programming%3F)

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dang
A related blog post is [https://research.googleblog.com/2018/04/introducing-
semantic...](https://research.googleblog.com/2018/04/introducing-semantic-
experiences-with.html) (posted by walterbell and lainon but didn't get
attention).

~~~
tim333
Glad to see Kurzweil's group has been up to something interesting.

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saagarjha
I tried tricking it a bit, and here's what I got:

Does P=NP: Something about rare earths, then a couple books that mention the
problem.
[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Does%20P%3DNP%3...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Does%20P%3DNP%3F)

Who are you: Looks like Books is shy.
[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Who%20are%20you...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Who%20are%20you%3F)

Why are fire trucks red? Apparently, there are different answers, and none
mention the Monty Python one.
[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Why%20are%20fir...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Why%20are%20firetrucks%20red%3F)

What is 1+1? 1, apparently. The same query without a question mark gives the
right answer.
[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=What%20is%201%2...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=What%20is%201%2B1%3F)

Which company used to have the motto "don't be evil"? Not Google, it seems.
[https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Which%20company...](https://books.google.com/talktobooks/query?q=Which%20company%20used%20to%20have%20the%20motto%20%22don%27t%20be%20evil%22%3F)

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itp
I'm curious where this narrative that Google dropped "don't be evil" comes
from.

At the time of the Alphabetization, there was some shuffling of the code of
conduct document, but everything lives on.

The Google code of conduct[0] still begins with "Don't be evil."

The Alphabet code of conduct[1] opens with "Employees of Alphabet and its
subsidiaries and controlled affiliates (“Alphabet”) should do the right
thing."

And yet I repeatedly read the claim that Google has secretly abandoned "don't
be evil"—presumably on the down low so that they can now do all the evil they
want.

[0]: [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-
conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html) [1]:
[https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-
conduct.html](https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-conduct.html)

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haZard_OS
My first question (and the response):

Q: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

A: The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of that silent wave, the sound
of an absence, the absence of the noise ordinarily made by the collision of
two hands.

    
    
       -from The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy … 

by Ron Rosenbaum

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pbw
This still feels like search and not "talking" to anything. To me talking
would require back-end-forth refinement.

I wonder why they are releasing this only against books? Does it not work
against the internet at large, or is it a question of scale? Because they
aren't even doing all books, it's only 100,000 of them.

I still think it's pretty cool. Some future natural language search will make
keyword search seem primitive. As in how did we survive with only it for so
long.

I'm glad Kurzweil ended up at Google and is able to work on cool projects like
this. He's 70, I hope his vitamins work and he can't stay active in
development a while longer.

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crypticlizard
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a minute! Instantly exciting and it
really works. I'm using this to explore old books I've read and forgotten
parts of. Really fun to relive those special moments from fantasy and sci fi
I've read over the years. Also this is an alternative to my experience at
bookstores where I thumb through interesting books.

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Krasnol
> will the AI take over the world?

\- The number of dumb things the AI will be able to get away with has a direct
relationship to what sort of intelligence the AI is supposed to represent.

\- The AI will not underestimate the opponent’s military might.

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shmerl
Well, first thing I expected it to use the microphone for actual listening to
talking. Alas, the title was misleading, and it expects text input.

An interesting idea anyway, but they could title it better.

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tabeth
This is a cool tool. Though this tool reminds me of a dilemma I have with
Google: what do you think about the fact that Google has effectively extracted
value from the authors of these books without paying them, yet Google itself
does not allow you to scrape them AFAIK (If I'm wrong I'd be curious to see
where in their ToS they allow this)?

Though Google doesn't seem to be monetizing this directly, the fact that
they're training their models on this data does likely have some nebulous
value. Given that most books are for sale, surely there's a good way to
reconcile the fact that the authors would like payment and organizations like
Google would like to scrape their text.

~~~
monk_e_boy
Google scrape your website, then allow people to search your site and read
snippets from it.

Google scans the book, then allows people to search the book and read snippets
from it.

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jccalhoun
This is fun but I hope it doesn't replace the normal gook search since it
doesn't seem to have any advanced search features like limiting by date.

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viktour19
Interesting. I wonder what the dataset used to train the machine learning
model looks like. Books and conversation style query pairs?

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z1mm32m4n
I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually using some techniques from NLP.
In particular, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd run sentence parsers over
their entire Books collection and then manipulate the parse trees to find
sentences in books that look like good answers because their sentence
structure is similar.

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gonogo
Wouldn't semantic searching be far more application as an extension of google
scholar or google patents?

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tejaswidp
There's also recoll, a document indexer and search tool, which I've heard is
pretty good.

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walterbell
Is Google still scanning orphan works?

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anonymas
This is great. books answered my question

"which countries supported Iraq chemical attacks during Iran-Iraq war?"

"Saddam Hussein received chemical weapons from many countries, including the
USA, West Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France and China (Lafayette,
2002). In 1980 Iraq attacked Iran and employed mustard gas and tabun with 5%
of all Iranian casualties directly attributable to the use of these agents"

from Handbook of Toxicology of Chemical Warfare Agents by Ramesh C. Gupta
“Handbook of Toxicology of Chemical Warfare Agents” by Ramesh C. Gupta

~~~
newguy89
That’s funny cause I just put that question into TTB and copied and pasted
that paragraph into google and found this page. Interesting indeed. I was more
looking into what could be proof that the chemical weapons use on Halabja are
the same ones tha Saddam had in his arsenal. Cross referencing the studies
that was done on the attack site with the sources might help seal the deal.

