Google can now understand language with 95% accuracy

Mary Meeker’s yearly Internet Trends Report can tell us plenty of what’s going on in the interwebs. Smartphone growth is slowing down, live TV is dying, internet usage is booming in India, and Netflix is all the hype. That is all to be expected, but there is one piece of information that really impressed us.

Apparently Google is now able to understand language with a 95% accuracy, rivaling human beings. Google’s jump from 80% in 2013 is credited to the search giant’s algorithms, which allow these services to learn as more users continue to utilize voice actions.

Either these statistics are flawed or I am a horrible speaker, but I swear about 30% of the time Google Home has no idea what the heck I’m saying. But hey, I am not here to refute Mary’s arguments. After all, she does have all the numbers. The truth is it is still impressive we can ask a robot to tell us about the weather, traffic or that joke I wake up to on a daily basis. And it can respond intelligently (at least most of the time).

So let’s assume Google can understand us as well as the next door neighbor. Where do we go from now? Well, we can still tell the digital assistant is… a digital assistant. The next step is fooling humans into thinking they are speaking to another person. Author Ray Kurzweil is working with Google to make chatbots, and he claims artificial intelligence should be able to pass the Turing test by 2029. This means people wouldn’t be able to differentiate it from human speech. Crazy, right?

Do hit the comments if you agree with me. Do you think Google can really understand us with a 95% accuracy? I don’t think that’s the case, at least in my experience.