Talking books

A puff for a new service from Google. The general idea seems to be that you ask it a question and it returns a series of quotes from books which seem to bear on the question. If the quote looks promising you can then dip into the book itself. No idea what they do about copyright.

I tried 'do fish feel pain' and it came up with some reasonable books - including at No.6 the one that I already own, illustrated left. So that checks out. I then tried 'is Pluto a planet' (something I know virtually nothing about) and the quotes all looked quite sensible. They addressed the question.

However, I then thought to try 'what is a blatte in French' and it did not seem to have a clue about that one, with the responses being very wide of the mark. See reference 4.

Clearly something to play with in idle moments.

I learned of this service from the newsletter sent out by the Kurzweil organisation.

Reference 1: https://books.google.com/talktobooks/.

Reference 2: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.11175.

Reference 3: https://research.google.com/semanticexperiences/.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/lazy-thief.html.