speech I can understand, but how does he figure pictures will be a huge way to search? There aren't that many times where I'm said to myself "I wish I could just take a picture to search for similar items".
Especially when we become so "plugged in" that I can search for what I see. Right now, if I want to see "tomato recipes" I'm probably not inclined to pull my phone out, take a picture (and who wants that on their stream anyway?) and then paste picture + recipes? I'd rather just type "tomato recipes". But if I can search what I see and speak, e.g. "oh look, tomatoes? Find recipes!" that's much easier.
For produce there are even more things I might be interested in. Is that a good tomato or what is that deformed looking red plant?
Essentially I'm saying that image searches have just never been useful for me without supplying textual context. Speech has the potential to help with that but just doesn't seem to work well in consumer devices yet. Speech will get there but image searches just aren't useful without speech or text.
And then at some point, it'll become a live-streaming thing. i.e. instead of actually flipping out your phone and taking a picture, it'll be some google glass type thing. You walk past a store and you look at it and it's recognized instantly. You can then get the wiki page, the floor plan from gov records, its online store and opening times from various online repositories of such information. Of course this is already possible using GPS, just an example.
This way you wouldnt have to do that.
I bet you've already done something like this with QR Code enabled posters.
A friend once quipped, "the best porn site in the world is Google." As "reverse image searches" (where you provide an image for the service to find image matches, similar photos, associated information on the photo to figure out the identity of the person in the photo) improve in quality and data mining from the pages they find the related images from, the more people will shift their behavior to this from the current text based searching.
There will of course be searches for similar looking wardrobe or other commerce or travel reasons. But online porn is a behemoth that will overshadow any other image based search motive. It is driven by one of man's three basic desires after all (nourishment, sleep, and sex).
- take a photo of a street scene and ask, "how do get home?"
- or more generally, "where am I?"
- If I hate reading every ingredient on a menu to check for allergies, why don't I point my phone at the menu and have it tell me what I would like best?
- "what's in this sandwich?"
- take a photo of water, "is this safe to drink?" (maybe realistic with near-IR?)
- "what plant is this?"
- record birdsong, "what species is that?"
- photo of text fragment, "who wrote this and which book is it from?"
I think mobile image search will see a big uptick if there's a good interface for it.