Futurist make tech predictions

[Brian]

According to an article at Wired.com titled Futurists Pick Top Tech Trends, future mobile devices will have better usability, improved natural speech recognition, and more social networking capabilities. In the article, a futurist discusses how more and more features have been added to our mobile devices at the expense of simplicity and usability. Future devices will be designed with more emphasis on ease of use while limiting features to those that are the most commonly used. Simply put, usability will make a comeback.

The problem, says Ian Pearson, futurist in residence at British Telecommunications, is that most people buy a device for a particular purpose. They neither want nor care about all the extra capabilities.

"We've done 20 years of adding functionality, and 99 percent of that functionality isn't needed," Pearson said. "There will be an enormous market over the next several years for really simple stuff."

More mobile applications that help us communicate and keep in touch with our friends, family members, and co-workers are coming, according to the article. Two current mobile social software applications (MoSoSos), Dodgeball (which was recently acquired by Google) and Playtxt, as well as mobile location-based services and mapping applications like Earthcomber and KMaps are examples of what's to come.

Futurists also predict that more mobile services will take advantage of improved natural speech recognition in the future.

Speech-recognition technology will be instrumental in enabling new mobile services, said Ronald Gruia, author of the blog Technology Futurist and emerging communications program leader at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. In recent years, speech software developers, in particular Nuance Communications, which until recently went by the name ScanSoft (SSFT), have gotten much better at what they do. Gruia believes it's only a matter of time before speech-enabled mobile apps for tasks like composing e-mail while driving can be commonplace.

Read the full article here.

Related: Editorial: Where are the intelligent handhelds?

[Evan]

Interesting remarks from Pearson. Now that I have a decidedly intelligent agent focus, in antiticipation of grad school, I wonder if even more is possible.

Social applications are certainly on the rise. In theory, geolocating cellphones should be possible in the US courtesy of e911 sometime soon if not already. Extending that capability for commercial purposes is extremely possible. Combine that with Google Maps and it establishes a location and a context. Combine that with the ability to automatically notify certain contacts listed on my cellphone of my location and then my friends can attempt to intuit what I'm up to at any given moment.

Actually, the notification mechanism is actually entirely practical given the variety of messaging systems avialable on the market (CORBA Notification Service and Java Messaging Service come to mind). Both systems implement a publish-subscribe model where a message is published by an individual and can be received by one or more subscribers. Add a user-center access control mechanism for my phone and then I can specify which phone numbers can receive my location. Other users could then subscribe (or not) for updates from my phone to theirs. No horribly fancy privacy features necessary. Granted there's a matter of scaling the solution but these messaging systems are design for that sort of thing.

But now that my friends know that I'm at the mall, now what? They don't know if I'm out shopping, having a meal alone or with a friend, or if I'm sitting in the mall's movie theatre with a hot date (well, ok, my fiance--but she's a hot date and I better keep on saying that if I know what's good for me).

Simplifying user interfaces is a good thing but commensurately reducing functionality is not necessarily so. Mobile devices could easily use my location and time to provide contextual suggestions. If it's about noon, I'm in motion (fairly easy to detect if my position can be tracked over time), and have been so for say a couple of hours, and happen to be near a mall, my PDA could then perform a quick query of Zagat's Guide, find a few good restaurants, sound a gentle chime, and tell me about them.

I'm wracking my brain for an interesting way for multiple anonymous PDAs to share contextual information to solve more interesting problems. Thoughts?

[cervezas]

I thought for a long time that voice recognition was going to be a killer app for mobile devices, and I'm sure it will still be fairly important. But I've started to wonder if people will really find this a natural and convenient way to interact with their mobile devices. It's not exactly what you'd call discreet, is it?

I've been thinking instead about high resolution cameraphones and how they could be used to recognize text and other symbols for dramatically simplified input to the device. Xerox just announced a breakthrough that purports to turn your mobile phone into a scanner with OCR running on a backend server. Snap a picture of some text and in seconds it comes back to your phone as plain text. With software on the device that can recognize simple text patterns--a URL, someone's contact information, the VIN number of a car, an ISBN number--you could navigate to a web site, or enter a contact, or download car repair records, or order a book from Amazon, all with a single click of the camera button. I see a whole new way for people to interact with any kind of text or coded identifier that they encounter as they go through their day.

Could be very fun, interactive stuff that would take off with young people. Imagine wearing a T-shirt that has your own unique symbol screened on it. Someone snaps a picture with their cameraphone, your symbol is identified on a server somewhere, which initiates a request on your phone for an IM chat with the person who took the picture. Or it takes them to your personal website or blog. Or let's them listen to what's playing on your music player at that moment.

With more intelligent devices, more complex language patterns could be "understood" and some truly amazing but simple applications could emerge. Brian keeps mentioning Jeff Hawkins' work with Numenta (an interest of mine as well) and this area of text interpretation seems like it might be amenable to even some fairly early stage technologies based on HTM.

I've been blogging about this and expect to put some more thoughts on it to page soon if anyone is interested. Cough! Shameless plug.

[Evan]

David,

Cool! Another Java developer! And an interesting looking site at that! I'll definitely give it a look later today.

The cameraphone OCR idea sounds interesting. Not having experimented with OCR too much, I wonder whether OCR would have difficulty capturing text with various lighting levels and foreground and background colors. I'm not sure that this would've occurred to me without the mention of vehicle VINs that, at least in the States, always appear on the dash of a vehicle in the form of a black metal plate with black text.

I'm still not sure how to feel about voice recognition--especially because it is somewhat limited to quiet locales lacking ambient noise. In isolation, voice recognation would almost certainly operate better in the traditional sense of executing operations or taking dictation on the user's behalf. However, I don't see it performing well in socially crowded settings. For instance, my Toyota Prius' navigation system becomes easily confused when someone else speaks while I'm issuing it a voice command.

On the flip side, I wonder if ambient noise itself could be repurposed as a legitimate input. Remove the "voice" from "voice recognition" and add "auditory". With a quality (and durable) microphone, perhaps a PDA could reliably distinguish one or more speakers. Even in the absence of VR, this would provide a sensory input allowing for a guess of the number of individuals proximate to the PDA.

[cervezas]

Originally Posted by cervezas

Xerox just announced a breakthrough that purports to turn your mobile phone into a scanner with OCR running on a backend server.

Here's the link I forgot to give to an article about Xerox's software for cleaning up and compressing these otherwise poor camphone images and making them suitable as inputs to optical character recognition algorithms.

The devil is in the details with this, as anyone who has used OCR knows. Just how accurate will this be?

[Brian]

Just a quick note and I'll respond in more detail to these excellent comments later...

Survey Says: Consumers want simple devices.

According to new research from J.D. Power and Associates, U.S. mobile phone owners are becoming increasingly concerned with their phones' design and ease of use.
[...]
In other findings, J.D. Power and Associates found that manufacturers are moving away from the candybar-shape design and more toward the clamshell design.

These new findings and the futurists' predictions about the growing tech trend for devices with excellent usability are both encouraging to hear.

Clamshells? Hmm..

[Bob Russell]

Originally Posted by Brian

Clamshells? Hmm..

I'll leave the more technical discussion of this to you guys, but the though to a move to more clamshell designs... I can only say WoooHoooo!

[cervezas]

Originally Posted by Evan

Cool! Another Java developer! And an interesting looking site at that!

Ditto for yours. I need to add you to my blogroll.

Originally Posted by Evan

On the flip side, I wonder if ambient noise itself could be repurposed as a legitimate input. Remove the "voice" from "voice recognition" and add "auditory". With a quality (and durable) microphone, perhaps a PDA could reliably distinguish one or more speakers. Even in the absence of VR, this would provide a sensory input allowing for a guess of the number of individuals proximate to the PDA.

I think ambient noise could be a useful input but, to pick up on the theme that Brian is emphasizing here, it's probably got to be something that simplifies the use of the device, not just something that adds a whiz-bang feature. Like it would be nice for the device to recognize it's in a noisy environment and automatically use the vibrating alarm when a call comes in or an appointment notification goes off.

The most useful thing to do with ambient noise in my opinion is to cancel it out while you're on a call or making a voice recording so your voice isn't drowned out by it. And I think that would actually be a critical development for voice recognition to be usable on mobile devices--at least in the beginning. Even noise cancellation is not a trivial thing. For it to work well in a noisy environment (without really heavy processing) I think you need a second sound sensor that is separate from the primary microphone. That starts to rub against the simple mobile device idea, but maybe you could have an unobtrusive Bluetooth mike that clips to a belt or purse strap for this purpose. Or maybe a BT headset and the receiver on the handset itself could form the two sensor points. That'd work as long as the handset isn't muffled up inside a purse or briefcase.

The first priority for mobile device makers right now is still the one that Jeff Hawkins foresaw when he started Palm: come up with mobile computers that most people feel naked without, like they do without their wristwatch or car keys. We've got a ways to go before we get there. In my opinion, it's after that point that device makers can start to see success with features like voice recognition since that's not just a technical shift, it's also a question of cultural acceptance.

[cervezas]

Oh, and yeah: three cheers for more clamshell devices! Give us stuff we don't need a stupid holster for, people! Well, ok, I don't mind the holster that much myself, but the noise I get from my wife about it, that's another matter!

Also it just seems like the clamshell form factor and the mini-keyboard are naturals for each other, doesn't it?

[cbarnett]

I agree, clamshells make a lot more sense. There's a lot more "real estate" for a mini keyboard (I really hate the on-screen keyboard, but when that's all you've got, you live with it). It also provides built-in protection for the screen, the most easily damaged part of the device.

Now if Dell would just make there next VGA PPC a clamshell....

[Evan]

Originally Posted by cervezas

I think ambient noise could be a useful input but, to pick up on the theme that Brian is emphasizing here, it's probably got to be something that simplifies the use of the device, not just something that adds a whiz-bang feature.

Granted. However, the more information that your PDA/smart phone can infer about your environment, the "smarter" the device can behave and the simpler that the user interface becomes.

Referring back to my incomplete example (woops) from an earlier post on this thread, if I'm in a dark environment (detected through the camera), I'm in extremely close proximity to several other cell phones (computable by the wireless provider via e911/poor-man's GPS), and all of the cell phones proximate to me are hearing the same ambient noise around a particular volume, then my PDA could infer that it's in a movie theatre and that it should automatically disable my ringer. This example becomes somewhat more feasable if PDAs could interact with each other anonymously based on external stimuli--bringing me back to intelligent agents! ;-)