Mountain View, California — Striving to keep its Labs application alive in the minds of its audience, search engine behemoth Google has quietly integrated an experimental Q&A service into Gmail chatbot, dubbed as “Talk Guru,” a service that enables you to obtain basic information such as the weather and sport scores by sending queries via instant message.
Once a user invites Google Talk Guru “guru@googlelabs.com,” the trial service will be added to your chat contacts instantly. Think of it as Google’s search engine, just slimmed down and in instant message form. Once done, then he or she can initiate a conversation to ask Guru a question, and you will receive an answer in no time than if you had been looking through a bunch of search results.
Here are some example questions for you to try…
Apparently, it is not very powerful, as it answers only a handful of simple questions. Most importantly, you need to know the proper syntax, as the service has no natural language processing. For instance, it cannot even answer “time in New York.”
Currently, there are quite insufficient number of search commands that work in Google Talk Guru. As you can see from the screenshot above, searches for international times are not supported (#1 and #2 above), but weather search (#3) and even a simple web search (#4) are. Google search will give you the answer right away.
Google Talk Guru currently supports seven search commands. In most cases Google Talk Guru and Google SMS are similar… they are handy, but not powerful. Nevertheless, we will see improvements in this area down the line to make it more than another search box.