Andi vs Talk to Books

Andi is an AI search assistant that answers questions, finds information across the web, and helps you navigate sites without wading through traditional link-heavy results. You ask in plain language, and Andi returns concise responses with sources you can verify.

The product is built around privacy and accuracy. Andi describes itself as free, private, and ad-free, with no ads in results and no search tracking. Its about page cites independent testing at 87% factual accuracy, comparing favorably to Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for direct answers.

Beyond Q&A, Andi supports web search, an ad-free reader mode, page summarization, simple explanations of complex pages, and direct navigation to websites and apps through go commands. It also includes AI writing tools for drafts, emails, and code.

You can use Andi in the browser, install it as a Progressive Web App, add it to your mobile home screen, or set it as your default search engine through browser setup guides and a Chrome extension.

Talk to Books was a Google Research experiment that let you ask natural-language questions and get answers pulled from passages across a large collection of books. You typed a question or statement, and the system returned relevant book excerpts instead of standard web search results. Google has shut the service down, but the site still hosts an archive of sample queries.

The project launched in 2018 as part of Google's Semantic Experiences initiative. It used neural language models for semantic matching and retrieval, showing how conversational queries could surface ideas buried in published books rather than blog posts or forums.

Researchers, students, and curious readers used Talk to Books to explore topics through book-length context. The experiment informed later semantic search features inside Google products such as Shopping, Maps, Gmail, and Hangouts.