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I'm getting entirely positive feedback about the new Find Verses About "Natural Language Search" capabilities of SwordSearcher 10.
Along with that, I am getting good questions about how it works.
Mostly, people want to make sure that it doesn't use cloud services to process their query. People want their searches to be kept private, not processed by an AI cloud service of some kind. This is totally reasonable!
I wanted to post an explanation of how this works here, to help allay such fears. First and foremost:
SwordSearcher runs entirely on your personal computer. It does not use any internet servers to handle your searches. All of its features are designed to run offline.
SwordSearcher does not use generative AI technology. I believe such technology has its place, but it is not integrated into SwordSearcher.
How does it work?
I don't want to give away every proprietary detail or get too technical, but here is what it does, briefly:
Natural Language Search works by converting words and phrases into numerical patterns that capture their semantic relationships. These patterns are pre-computed for every Bible verse and stored in an index file on your computer. When you search, your query is converted to the same kind of numerical pattern and compared against the index to find the closest matches. It is essentially a mathematically-enhanced concordance. This is an information retrieval technique that came out of information retrieval and search engine research, not the chatbot or generative AI world.
This is not generative AI. Specifically:
All it does is help you find relevant verses faster.
Along with that, I am getting good questions about how it works.
Mostly, people want to make sure that it doesn't use cloud services to process their query. People want their searches to be kept private, not processed by an AI cloud service of some kind. This is totally reasonable!
I wanted to post an explanation of how this works here, to help allay such fears. First and foremost:
SwordSearcher runs entirely on your personal computer. It does not use any internet servers to handle your searches. All of its features are designed to run offline.
SwordSearcher does not use generative AI technology. I believe such technology has its place, but it is not integrated into SwordSearcher.
How does it work?
I don't want to give away every proprietary detail or get too technical, but here is what it does, briefly:
Natural Language Search works by converting words and phrases into numerical patterns that capture their semantic relationships. These patterns are pre-computed for every Bible verse and stored in an index file on your computer. When you search, your query is converted to the same kind of numerical pattern and compared against the index to find the closest matches. It is essentially a mathematically-enhanced concordance. This is an information retrieval technique that came out of information retrieval and search engine research, not the chatbot or generative AI world.
This is not generative AI. Specifically:
- It does not generate text or answer questions — that is what chatbots like ChatGPT do, and this is not that
- It does not interpret or explain Scripture
- It does not connect to any cloud service or send your data anywhere
- It cannot answer questions — even if you phrase your search as a question, it is still just finding verses by semantic similarity, not generating an answer
- It cannot "hallucinate" or make things up — every result is an actual Bible verse
- Just like using a printed concordance, it is up to the user to study out if a verse is relevant to their query and to read the context to understand its application
All it does is help you find relevant verses faster.
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