Google Talk Guru Can Answer Your Questions via Chat

Google Labs is full of interesting, quirky tools. The latest addition is a Google Chat bot that can answer questions and even do simple calculations. If you want to find out what's the weather like in some city, or last night's score, the Google Talk Guru can help you.

It's not the most advanced tool in the world, its understanding of natural language leaves to be desired, but it could prove useful at times.

"Google Talk Guru is an experimental service that allows people to get information like sports results, weather forecasts, definitions etc via chat. It works on many popular chat applications that support Google Talk," Guru is described.

Since Guru is essentially a Google Talk user, you can chat him up from any client that supports Talk, basically any Jabber client. The simplest way of trying out the new Labs feature is from the chat box in Gmail.

Just paste the guru@googlelabs.com contact in the chat search box and click Invite. Once Guru has been added to your contacts list, you can start a conversation just you normally would and ask away.

Guru is pretty much on par with what some search OneBoxes can do. Simple calculations can be solved, you can get the weather for various places, or get word definitions.

Talk Guru is not very strict in the syntax you can use, but it's not a natural language interpreter. For example, typing "what's up" will return an explanation for the word 'up.' You can get the same result by typing "define up."

Along with definitions you can also translate words and phrases quickly with Talk Guru. Just type 'translate' then the thing you want to translate and finally the language you want.

You can also do currency and unit conversion, from USD to EUR or from mph to km/h and so on. All in all it can prove rather useful. Interestingly enough, it's rather similar to a tool Aardvark, a company specializing on social Q&A, offered before being acquired by Google.