Thoughts on Smart Search
I have a Logos Pro subscription, though up until now I have not tried any of the new AI features. I thought I would give it a try today and had some mixed results. My Test was using a book search with the question: "When did Job live?"
Things I liked in the results:
1) The Summary was helpful and relevant. The references in the summary make it reasonably trustworthy.
2) Search Results: The ability to click on a title in the results and open the resource to the quoted area was very helpful and convenient
3) The ability to summarize was useful in some longer articles to know if I should select those for later reading.
4) Bolding relevant terms in the results helped quickly show relevancy
Things that did not go as well
1) Many good resources were missed and were not presented in the first several pages of results (if at all). This included some of my preferred prioritized commentaries that clearly deal with this specific topic that I would always want included in such results. Part of trusting Smart Search is knowing that it is not only factually accurate, but also comprehensive in that it will not miss quality resources that I already have. If I just have to go back and do a manual search later to make sure important resources were not missed, then the whole purpose of the Smart Search is lost. I want Smart Search to better and more easily utilize the resources I already have that have historically required a lot of manual work to find and use. This test result did not accomplish this well.
2) The list within the first page contained non-relevant answers to my question and some not even about the Job in any way. Again, this is an issue because of many high quality resources in my library that should have been included in the results, weren't. Hopefully this will improve with time.
3) Some wacky and irrelevant results such as this one on the search term did:
Entries like this just make the list of results to go through longer and take unnecessary time. Hopefully these will be areas of improvement in the future. So I do see how this could become very useful with some of these issues being addressed, but for now I am still probably looking at using more manual searches than smart ones.