Media News - Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Startup lets public test conversational Web search
Powerset, an ambitious start-up that aims to let people search the Web using conversational speech instead of just keywords, began opening up its site on Monday for public testing of the technology. Powerset wants to leapfrog the current generation of search services from established providers Google Inc, the market leader, and Yahoo Inc, Google's closest rival. The 2-year-old company has licensed so-called natural language processing technology, developed over three decades at the Xerox Corp PARC research center in Silicon Valley, to create consumer Web search services. The goals of natural language search lie at the heart of the classic debate over artificial intelligence and whether computers are capable of understanding human speech. The San Francisco-based firm is letting Web users sign up to try out features of the system at http://www.powerset.com/. It plans to invite hundreds of users to its Powerset Labs site each week over the coming months. The feedback will help it finalize the underlying software algorithms before investing in the huge computer systems needed to start crawling the Web ahead of the launch of a consumer service next year. (Reuters)
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