Talk to Books

Talk to Books is an experimental AI tool developed by Google AI (launched 2018) that lets users explore over 100,000 books through natural language queries instead of keyword matching. Users ask questions or make statements, and the tool uses a neural language model with semantic search to surface relevant book passages as conversational responses. It highlights matched sentences in bold alongside surrounding context, and supports filtering results by book category. The project, led by Ray Kurzweil, demonstrated AI-driven semantic retrieval and influenced similar features across other Google products.