(From ACRL TechConnect blog, by Margaret Heller )

“Is the future of research voice controlled? It might be, because when I originally had the idea for this post my first instinct was to grab my phone and dictate my half-formed ideas into a note, rather than typing it out. Writing things down often makes them seem wrong and not at all what we are trying to say in our heads. (Maybe it’s not so new, since as you may remember Socrates had a similar instinct.) The idea came out of a few different talks at the national Code4Lib conference held in Los Angeles in March of 2017 and a talk given by Chris Bourg. Among these presentations the themes of machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, voice search, and virtual assistants intersect to give us a vision for what is coming. The future might look like a system that can parse imprecise human language and turn it into an appropriately structured search query in a database or variety of databases, bearing in mind other variables, and return the correct results. Pieces of this exist already, of course, but I suspect over the next few years we will be building or adapting tools to perform these functions. As we do this, we should think about how we can incorporate our values and skills as librarians into these tools along the way.

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