Google has revolutionised the way we holiday, shop, work and play. Now, with Knowledge Graph, it plans to radically transform the way we search the internet… again. But some voice qualms about the company's ambitions
In the past couple of years, a great advance in voice-recognition technology has allowed you to talk to search apps – notably on iPhone's Siri as well as Google's Jelly Bean – while Google Now, awarded 2012 innovation of the year, will tell you what you want to know – traffic conditions, your team's football scores, the weather – before you ask it, based on your location and search history. Page's brain implants remain some way further off, though both Google founders have lately been wearing "Google Glass" prototypes, headbands that project a permanent screen on the edge of your field of vision, with apps – cameras, search, whatever – answerable to voice-activated command. Searching is ever more intimately related to thinking.
