Dave Girouard, general manager of Google Enterprise, said the next logical step after helping people search for a car would be to help them find the damn car keys once in a while.
"At Google we understand the youth of today is becoming more and more comfortable with the computer, they don't need help organizing their program files," Girouard said. "However, our research shows that nearly 1-in-3 eight-year-olds spend, roughly, three hours per month looking for his or her shoes before they go outside to play."
Girouard goes on to claim that those three hours, "could be used for better activities to help stimulate an eight-year-old's maturing mind... such as searching for porn on Google."
The new application, which is set to be released in the fourth quarter of this year, is said to be available to the public for free. To help pay for bandwidth and processing costs Google will rely on its "non-distracting" advertisements. However, instead of appearing next to your searches like they on the computer, translucent bubbles will pop up next to the head of the person you are talking with.
"If a kid asks his mom 'Hey mom, what's for dinner?" Google Home Search will be able to scan the acoustic waves in the room, decipher the conversation, and promptly display a list of nearby restaurants and diners that use Google advertising," Girouard explains. "Furthermore, Home Search will be able to detect and translate nearly any world language." He chuckles whilst declaring, "So don't think you can get out of seeing our ads by talking some 'middle-eastern mumbo-jumbo!' Besides, they're, uh, they're really not that distracting... once you get used to them."
All this talk of someone or something scanning conversations has caused quite a stir with some of the public. Claims have been made that Google’s new program would not only be an invasion of privacy, but could also lead to the misuse of the program to aid robberies and even allow small children to find dangerous and potentially hazardous items throughout the house.
“Oh… shit. We hadn’t really thought about that angle. But honestly,” replies Girouard, “you’d have to be pretty twisted to want to find something that’s harmful to you. Google Home Search is intended to find things like the remote control, the sports section of the newspaper, and things like that. I mean—well then again, I have always wondered where my wife hides the Twinkies.”
1 comment:
I accidently found your blog when I used google to try to find some friends.
Keep up the good work.
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