Voice interfaces and bots are hitting the metadata wall, just like classic search

What is a metadata?
"It describes the types, versions, relationships and other characteristics of digital materials." Wikipedia.

How is it used in search?

Imagine that "shirt A" has the following metadata in an e-commerce website:

  • Size: S, M, L, XL
  • Color: black
  • Style: funny
  • Availablity: US, Europe
  • Material: synthetic
  • Design: street art.


If you search on the e-commerce website search engine:
"street art shirt", and narrow color to black shirts, "shirt A" will pop up.

If you ask this e-commerce website's bot:
"do you have a funny black shirt?" It will pop!

Metadata magic.

Without metadata, search engines can't work, neither than voice search or bots.

If you seek a restaurant serving good fish, with decent veggie options, with a terrace, at 10 km max from where you live, you'll suffer finding it.
Indeed:

  • Most search engines don't attach quality of a certain category of dishes (here, fish) to a restaurant. 
  • Most list veggie restaurant but no one attaches the quality of the veggie option.
  • Terrace exist in some search engines, not all. 
  • Radius searches do not really exist but some flavor of location-based search exist.


So here metadata is the game changer.
So let's hope AIs will help improving metadata tagging all over the web! Adobe (my employer) is developing pretty good ones for image meta-tagging!
Before that, the best natural speech recognition bots will be clueless.