Nursery school-age children could soon have a search engine specially built for them. The engine, designed and built by Google, would be geared toward kids who cannot yet read words.
Google's developers would “gamify” the search engine experience of looking up information, according to the patent. The investors say the search engine, powered by a digital assistant, would help child development by allowing the kids to ask educational questions and would then quiz them about certain topics.
Google Assistant is installed in phones, tablets and smart speakers and allows voice search on third-party kids' games, but the patent claims inventors want to do more to “assist young users,” so they do not need to read textual prompts.
The patent, which dates back to 2016, is titled Gamifying Voice Search Experience for Children. The description suggests kids would pull up the search box by popping colorful bubbles on the screen and then speak the term they want information about, such as animals or sports.
The bubbles may serve up with a visual search prompt such as a question mark to demonstrate it pertains to a search query. If the user clicks on the bubble, an audio search prompt may display that hints at a question to identify a topic for a search.
For example, the audio search prompt may be “What is your favorite animal?” If the user provides a voice response to such a prompt by naming the animal, a search can be performed based on the response and the content, such as a video, will serve up.
Audio searches, for example, may consist of favorite animals, video games, sports, flowers, places and things.
In one instance, when a response to an audio search prompt “What is your favorite animal?” is played to the user, the user may respond, “Giraffe!” In this case, the verbal response “Giraffe” would trigger a search query and return any media related to Giraffes.