Earlier this year, Google released its generative AI product Bard to the public but before Bard, Google was using a neural language model in a product called Talk to Books. This AI launched in 2018 but didn’t get as much fanfare as Bard, and now the search giant is killing it off.
Talk to Books was a helpful tool, it allowed you to type in a natural question and it would return search results from relevant passages in books. One of the issues was that it would only show you a snippet of the book in response to your question but you couldn’t get the context unless those pages were available from Google.
“The experiment proved the effectiveness of language models (sometimes called semantic matching or semantic retrieval models), and they went on to drive features inside such products as Google Shopping, Maps, Gmail, Hangouts, and others,” Google said in a statement. “As with all experiments that eventually reach a conclusion, Talk To Books has taught us all it has to teach and will be closing down effective immediately.”
For those who used Talk to Books, Google recommends getting “a new kind of AI experience” with Google Bard. It’s not a perfect replacement by any stretch of the imagination, but there is overlap and in some ways, Bard is more capable.
One of the nice things about Talk to Books was that it was only returning answers from books which tend to be authoritative. Bard, on the other hand, pulls some information from the web - sometimes it just makes things up too, not good.
Hopefully, Google can find a way to add Talk to Books functionality into Bard so that users of the now defunct service can carry on getting a similar experience from Google.
Have you tried Talk with Books? Are you sad to see it go?
