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Top Google boss Peter Norvig says speech recognition, video content is the future

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Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, was in Ireland last week to give a lecture at the University of Cork and was interviewed by John Kennedy of SiliconRepublic.com

Norvig is the man behind the Google Search and the core web search algorithms in the world’s biggest Internet company. He also leads the team that created Google Translate.

He joined Google in 2002.

“When I started we created a new index of the web every month," he told Kennedy."  And I thought that was a lot compared to a library card product which we had been thinking of ourselves as being like. They didn’t update and we thought we were pretty good.

“And then we said people started to search for news on Google and we said now we’re going to have to update every day and hour and now with tweets it’s every minute. We’re driven by the fact that we’ve got to have more users, more documents and more speed.”

By next year Kennedy notes 50 per cent of all traffic on the Internet will be video and the next 1bn users of the web will be via mobile.

Norvig says Google is ready “We’ll do more with indexing the actual content of the video. We started out just searching the keywords of the video and now we’ve started doing speech recognition of the spoken word in the videos and over time we’ll start pulling out objects –this has a car in it that’s in a car chase. That’ll be a challenge.

“We’ve already got the Maps platform and geographic data will fit right in and I think you’re right there will be a lot more available.”

Talking to computers will be a big step forward Norvig thinks "Yeah, you’ll see more of that. I don’t know if English will be the right language to talk to our computers, now we use keywords and there is some advantage to that over regular English and there is some advantage to that, rather than just talking sentences.

“Sometimes keywords and sometimes more complex commands. We’re still at the point where we get impressive results but the searcher is doing most of the work; you have to figure out what you’re looking for, which of the results you’re looking at and if you have to integrate the results, you’ll have to do that all on your own.

“I think there are a few places we’re starting to go beyond that. For example the news results and these live stories, trying to synthesize more of the results in to one place. Where you do a search and instead of one result here’s 10 unrelated links. Rather we’ll say how do they go together and we’ll fit them all together and then maybe you’ll have a report where you’re interested in part of a story and we’ll show that on a map, or give it a timeline and allow interaction back and forth where the computers are helping you make sense of it and not just showing you possibilities that you have to make sense of.”

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