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BlackBerry Bold
December 5, 2008
After work today Meredith showed off her new BlackBerry Bold, and am I ever impressed. It has only been in the last year or so that the BlackBerry has really grabbed my attention: They've improved to the point that they are extremely attractive, versatile devices.
The Bold's screen is fantastic. I'm blown away by the resolution of these new displays, and on-screen fonts are extremely crisp and well proportioned. In addition to the great screen, I love how the overall look of the screen and upper portion is flat and glossy.
After playing with the music player, video player, and camera, I am reminded by the amazing convergence that is happening and will continue to happen. We're now at the point of combining telephone, email, web search, maps, music, video, camera, calendar + tasks, GPS, voice notes, ... wow. Incredible.
It occurred to me this week that the BlackBerry and iPhone represent great AI devices. I guess Google's voice search hints at this, but I'm thinking more directly about what I've been working on. Imagine wearing a wireless earbud and a wireless lapel microphone. The BlackBerry/iPhone would interpret speech and relay responses to user via the earbud.
The amazing thing is that it would be as if the whole of the Internet were inside your head. You could be anywhere at any time and ask almost any question and get an answer "inside your head".
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Kitchen computingNovember 10, 2008
Something that I'm coming to realize is that my interests in natural language processing, voice interface, and home automation all converge on the kitchen. And so this concept of "kitchen computing" comes to mind, which seems like a relatively untapped area. We've been using our PCs in the study, bedroom, or in the den for a couple of decades. In the last 10 years, computing has entered the living room in the form of the Media Center PC, Xbox, and PS3. But the kitchen has yet to change much. I think that the lack of progress in the areas of natural language processing, voice interfaces, microphone technology, and home automation are the reasons for this, and so as I explore these areas, I'm intrigued by the possibilities. Some random thoughts:   | I see kitchen computing as being much more "hands free" than in other areas, more so than the living room. More often our hands are busy or we're in the middle of doing something and don't want to walk across the room to use a traditional PC. (Or our hands aren't clean) This is where the need for better microphone, voice interface, and natural language parsing technology come in. |
| The kitchen is really the hub of the family's operations, and it's the place that most often brings us together, so it's an area that is ripe with opportunity. |
| Meal planning |
| Meal preparation |
| Purchasing groceries |
| Managing the family calendar |
| Email is a very efficient means of communication, and the BlackBerry and other hand held devices have pushed (hah) email to the next level. But there's still room to grow. Paired with a voice interface and home automation system, email can be gotten and sent on behalf of a person greatly extending their reach. For example, consider standing in the kitchen working on supper and saying "Grace, ask Meredith when she'll be home", or "Ask Billy where he is", or "Tell Billy that supper is at 6". A person with a BlackBerry receives the question within seconds, and their typed reply can be spoken to the person who asked the question in the kitchen: "Meredith has replied. She says: I'll be back by 6". There are many advantages to this kind of communication over making a voice phone call. |
| HD video conferencing: An LCD in the kitchen becomes a viewport into the world, and brings with it the possibility of "replacing" the phone with HD video conferencing, the next leap after VOIP. Back in the '90s we would imagine the day when we'd have video phones, and that day is getting closer. Both the broadband Internet and camera technology exist today to make this a reality. |
Using computers for meal planningNovember 6, 2008
It strikes me that computers and home automation could be used to improve health and give people more free time if they were used for meal planning. Consider the following scenario: "Grace, make a meal plan for this week." The computer would have the following information at its disposal: | The family recipes, including ingredients lists, and therefore, nutritional value. Each recipe would have a rating to indicate how much it was liked. |
| An inventory of what food was currently in the fridge, freezer, and cupboards. |
| A record of what meals were eaten at home in previous weeks. |
Using this information, a meal plan could be put together that would: | 1. | Be nutritionally balanced and not deficient in any important area. |
| 2. | Use foods more often that are already in the fridge, freezer, or cupboards. |
| 3. | Use foods more often that are in season, and likewise, foods that could be purchased from local producers. |
| 4. | Use recipes more often that are liked. |
| 5. | Not use recipes that were already used very recently. |
There are a number of variables to optimize, but that's what computers do best: Crunch possibilities and come up with something that is optimum. Since different families would value different things, there could be "sliders" to adjust how important the different criteria were, such as how important it is to use local foods. Another, related use case would be to ask: "Grace, recommend a recipe for tonight", which would take into account what foods were already in the house to plan a tasty meal, helping to use up foods that would otherwise go bad and reducing unnecessary trips to the grocery store. older >>
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