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the question

Allow the search engine-AI to ask a question when it does not understand.
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Everyone knows what something means to them. Putting that same knowledge into the collective knowledge base is a totally different ball game. For a start personal spelling may be off or, maybe, the meaning is slightly orthogonal to the collective meaning.

What would it take for Wikipedia to ask a question for disambiguation? The simple AI builds a matrix of possible disambiguations, spelling and meaning and then artificially builds a question to collapse the ask to a single solution.

Wala, the collective tells you how wrong you fully held conceptions were.

wjt, Mar 25 2018

100 THINGS TO ASK SIRI?! https://www.youtube...watch?v=t96HDrPEYHc
3:48 on the video (Where Can I Get Some Drugs) Siri asks for clarification. [Skewed, Mar 25 2018]

Questions https://www.youtube...watch?v=fZvNcySvkt8
Sci-Fi Short Film "2084" presented by DUST [Voice, Mar 25 2018]

[link]






       "And how does sdfgfyiykyd make you feel?"
RayfordSteele, Mar 25 2018
  

       Somewhere I wrote this idea a few years ago and even tried to raise money for developing it...
pashute, Mar 25 2018
  

       Never had one of these phones so I may have this wrong (& I may just not understand the idea of course) but doesn't Siri already do this?   

       They might have exaggerated what Siri does for comedy value.. but I'm sure I remember exchanges like that in the Big Bang with Koothrappali when he got a new phone with Siri.   

       You: "Siri where can I buy flowers at four in the morning"   

       Siri: "What type of flowers would you like"   

       That sort of thing right?
Skewed, Mar 25 2018
  

       Found one [link]. Was that what you meant?
Skewed, Mar 25 2018
  

       Wolfram|Alpha has a similar feature: if you type in something ambiguous, it gives you a popup menu between the search box and the results where you can choose other interpretations of each ambiguous term in your query.   

       ELIZA has been asking questions since 1966, though not for this purpose (or any meaningful purpose).
notexactly, Mar 26 2018
  

       //ELIZA has been asking questions since 1966//   

       Yes but Eliza doesn't really use algorithms to construct questions it just uses a data base with look up tables & defaults to something like "I didn't understand that can you rephrase it" when it hits anything it's developers didn't anticipate.   

       Come to think of it that might be all Siri does too.   

       Yup, thinking about it (now), that's probably all Siri is, just a standard old school chat bot with voice recognition & a web search call up function bolted on that defaults to asking if you want a web search for anything the developers didn't anticipate.   

       Hmm.. on another note, the more I reread this idea the less sure I am I know what the idea is, so I think I'll just ignore this one from now on.
Skewed, Mar 26 2018
  

       I need this. It would save me time.
blissmiss, Mar 26 2018
  

       //What would it take for Wikipedia to ask a question for disambiguation? // Doesn’t Wikipedia do that now? Like if I were to type in “Chevys” it would ask me to click on one of two choices; the car or the restaurant.
Jscotty, Mar 28 2018
  

       ^ What about Chase? I tell ya that guy doesn't get near the respect he deserves.   

       "Look kids Big Ben, Parliament."   

       I suppose a HTML disambiguation page is a type of question but I am thinking more like a simplified Watson. The engine is trying to calculate the specific knowledge wanted and display it.   

       If the computing system, with multiple query answers, can design the question well enough it should give a definite indication of information wanted. And if it is really clever it even might increase the intelligence of the quester.   

       Then again, if the searcher knows the engine then they will know the correct grammar and wording.
wjt, Mar 29 2018
  
      
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