Voice search: a review

A little over two weeks ago my favourite search engine (favourite because I’m too lazy to try the others) rolled out voice search and search by image. I tried them out so that, if you’ve not yet got a chance to use them, you can raise or lower your expectations accordingly

I wasn’t expecting great success with voice search, considering my Kenyan accent and all. I was pleasantly surprised!

Searches that went well

These were simple queries which yielded what I was looking for as the first result:

Voice search for national parks in Namibia

The people behind voice search recommend it for recipes:

Voice search for a recipe

Conversions worked fantastically!

Voice search for currency conversion

Voice search for weight conversions

Be sure not to leave out the word ‘degrees’:

Voice search for currency conversions

Searches that kind of went well

My search term wasn’t the first, but almost:

Voice search for the definition of 'specious'

I was getting flustered so I went looking for the introductory video I’d watched:

Voice search for a voice search help video

Searches that were epic fails

The nice engineer in the video (or maybe the text on the page, I don’t recall) said that I could do translations with voice search. I beg to differ:

Voice search for 'Highway Code in Italian' (1)

I tried again:

Voice search for 'Highway Code in Italian' (2)

They also said voice search was good for long queries:

Voice search for 'Photos of archaeological sites in Turkey' (1)

Woe is my non-American accent:

Voice search for 'Photos of archaeological sites in Turkey' (2)

How about a long query made up of simple words, in this case the fragment of a hymn that’s been floating through my head?

Voice search using a 20-word query

Voice search using a 20-word query (2)

Here’s what I was searching for: “What more can He say than to you He has said, to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled”.
Just because I could, I tried some foreign place names. I tried to look for this cemetery in Paris.

Voice search for a place in France

I searched for this tourist trap with a passable French accent:

Voice search for another place in France

Conclusion

My Italian accent is way better than my American one, so maybe I’ll use voice search more when it expands geographically. Or maybe I’ll just stick to typing in stuff.

Search by image: a review

A little over two weeks ago my favourite search engine (favourite because I’m too lazy to try the others) rolled out voice search and search by image. I tried them out so that, if you’ve not yet got a chance to use them, you can raise or lower your expectations accordingly

The idea for search by image is simple: drag and drop an image into the search box. I used my own photos which had the default name and no extra meta information (such as geotagging, etc) that would make the search engine’s job easier.

Architecture

It got these two right:

Search by image using a photo of St Paul's Outside the Walls

Search by image using a photo of Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, Italy

It was able to recognise the Spanish Steps even with the people, scaffolding and temporary decorative flowers:

Search by image using a photo of the Spanish Steps

It got stuck on the 21st century Ara Pacis museum:

Search by image using a photo of the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome

Landscapes

It got the idea of sky and water:

Search by image using a photo of Lake Nemi, Italy

And that of sky and (mountainous) land:

Search by image using a photo taken in Antrodoco, Italy

Objects

If it can’t make out what’s in the photo, it goes for matching colours:

Search by image using a photo of a fruit stand

Search by image using a photo of a red flower

Faces

A human face is recognised as such, but I’d hope for more similarity (Picasa’s face recognition spoiled me):

Search by image using a photo of a person

Not wishing to use pics of my friends and acquaintances, I used my cats. Bolla looks like food (which is kind of funny considering Bolla eats A LOT):

Search by image using a photo of a cat

Missing and presumed dead Tempesta is inscrutable, but at least there’s one cat in the suggestions:

Search by image using a photo of a cat

A black and white shot of Wiki brings up lots of human faces, as well as an unexpected symbol:

Search by image using a photo of a cat

Conclusion

I’d hoped that it would work better than it did, especially with faces. I guess that will improve with time.

Next: Should people with non-American accents bother with voice search?

It’s the end of the world! (Except in Africa)

I not-so-recently watched the blockbuster movie 2012 (spoilers ahead), 2012: Supernova and 10 or so minutes of 2012: Doomsday. They were all exceptionally bad movies.

I watched Supernova precisely because it was lousy. In one scene, the panel of eminent scientists (an American, a Chinese and a Russian— it sounds like the beginning of a  joke) were making last-minute calculations as they awaited to get on the Space Shuttle. They were going to save the world with calculations done by hand on paper. Someone hand them a slide rule, for goodness’ sake! They proceed to enter the Shuttle dressed in apparel resembling overalls and motorcycle helmets. The entire film was an insult to intelligence.

To watch 2012, you similarly have to suspend your disbelief. Numerous times the characters outran (on foot, in cars and planes) the earth crumbling beneath them. But the part that had me laughing loudest was the end. The survivors sail to Africa, whose landmass had been spared all the flooding and falling into bottomless chasms that had affected the rest of the world (its surface area had even grown!). Never mind that there may just be people living there, our bunch of billionaires are going to start afresh on the continent.

I’m not sure which I prefer: the end-of-the-world flicks that totally ignore Africa (all of them), or this one which is ridiculously patronising.

We’re not like that nowadays

[I started this post almost 5 weeks ago. Clearly, I haven't reformed my procrastinating ways.]

Humans can be astonishingly self-contradictory. That’s what I took away from watching an episode of  History Cold Case, a BBC documentary in which “skeletons of everyday people from across the ages are analysed in staggering detail” (description from BBC website).

A little background info: In the Ipswich Man episode, a skeleton of an apparently sub-Saharan African man is found in a medieval burial ground in Ipswich during the construction of a residential complex. The team of scientists on History Cold Case sets out to find out what an African was doing in England in the period around 1200-1500: where he came from, how he got there and why he was found buried next to a monk in a friary cemetery.

What caught my interest was the role of Christians in the Ipswich man’s journey to and stay in England, because in it I saw the ugly and the beautiful in those who profess the name of Christ. First, the ugly. The scientists were able to conclude within reason that the man was taken to England by knights returning from the Crusades, though it remains unknown whether he went as a captive or a free man. The Crusades were a horrible idea, to put it mildly. Most of them were organised in the hopes of padding the coffers of European noblemen, who had no intentions of spreading the gospel. This, of course is a broad generalisation.

Now for the beautiful. The forensic specialist was able to deduce from the man’s skeleton that he suffered a spinal abscess that almost certainly disabled him and most certainly caused him no small amount of pain. Back then, cutting-edge medical care was to be found in monasteries. A study of some of the other skeletons found in the same burial site revealed that all those individuals suffered from debilitating chronic diseases, leading the team of scientists to the conclusion that they were being cared for by the Franciscan monks who ran the friary.

How is it that the same age produced such contradictory responses in men? On one hand, there were those who went —ostensibly in Christ’s name— to destroy life and on the other were those who went—in Christ’s name—to take care of people with little hope of recovery (in the age before penicillin).

What will future generations say about ours?

[And now for an addendum borne from further thinking through things]

As this post languished as a draft, I came to realise my arrogance and short-sightedness. My attitude reeked not only of elder-brother syndrome, but also of chronological snobbery.  I’ll start with the latter.

Chronological snobbery, a term coined by C.S. Lewis, is the mistaken belief that our age is superior to those that have preceded it. So we can look back even 50 years and think people then primitive in their thoughts and beliefs. Or indeed, I could watch a BBC documentary and think the Christians in the medieval period to be such brutes.

Elder-brother syndrome, named for the prodigal son’s elder brother in Luke 15, is being self-righteous and considering yourself better than someone else who does all sorts of vile stuff you’d never do. I’ve blogged about this syndrome before.

The truth is there are lots of people today who profess Christ and do all sorts of weird stuff (like protesting other churches). And there are probably many more who are pouring out Christ’s love to the “undeserving”. When faced with believers who’re not living up to what we perceive to be the right standards, we need to be more like Jesus and less like James and John, remembering that it is only through God’s enabling grace that we can live up to those standards.

A chemical education

This post is for anyone who’s been tormented by questions such as, “Why is there dimethicone in my deodorant?” Anyone else is fervently urged to move along, or else run the risk of being bored to tears.

Curiosity having got the better of me, and having a lot of time on my hands, I decided to look up the ingredients in my shower gel, shampoo, body lotion, deodorant and mouthwash. My research was greatly aided by Google suggest, meaning that I didn’t have to type put some of those impossibly long names in their entirety. Eventually I landed on a couple of sites which between them had a wealth of information: cosmeticanalysis.com and cosmeticsinfo.org. Here’s what I found (the names of the products may sound pretentious, and that’s because I looked them up on the manufacturers’ websites): Read the rest of this entry »

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Write the non-future

A few days before the World Cup began, I watched this most interesting video by Nike:

With last night’s elimination of Portugal, all the players featured (Drogba, Cannavaro, Rooney, Ribery, Donovan, Ronaldinho (who didn’t even make it onto the team) and Ronaldo) are no longer on their way to making history. I guess they can console themselves with the oodles of cash they got for the ad. And I can make fun of Nike and gain no benefit whatsoever from doing so

I have no ideas…

I’ve run out of blog ideas.  So, enjoy the following entries from my church’s inbox:

The US Attorney General has come to our rescue!

Letter purporting to be from US Attorney General

(Why were they discussing fraud at a nuclear summit?)

The UN Secretary General has also come to our rescue!

Letter purporting to be from UN Secretary General

(We sorely need more people to make the world a better place!)

Whose idea was this??

Dung beetle

I loved the dung beetle at the opening ceremony of the World Cup! It shows that someone on the planning committee has a sense of humour…

On sleep

This month’s edition of the National Geographic magazine has an article on sleep. The author interviewed a William Dement, and asked him what he knew, after 50 years of research, about the reason we sleep. His response: “As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.”

My aim isn’t to bash science and scientists, like some Christians are wont to do.  However, I can’t help but smile when the Creator confounds His creation. Here’s one way I think the Bible answers the journalist’s question: sleep is a reminder from God of our dependence on Him. He’s the One who never slumbers nor sleeps. We need to sleep; a lack of it would literally kill us.

I also find it interesting that in the new heavens and new earth there will be no night, from which it can be inferred that there’ll no longer be a need for sleep. Hmmm… that means I need to enjoy all my sleep in this life!