{"id":121,"date":"2011-01-18T11:17:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T22:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=121"},"modified":"2011-01-18T11:17:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T22:17:00","slug":"wild-ideas-free-to-a-good-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/wild-ideas-free-to-a-good-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild ideas free to a good home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>1.<\/b>You know in sf you get to say &#8220;Oh hi computer, calculate this for me \/ find me information about this thing \/ make me some hot Earl Grey tea!&#8221; and the computer says &#8220;Sure thing, my friend!&#8221; and does it?<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s how that could work in the near future:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>speech recognition &#8211; this is fairly well developed already (I&#8217;ve recently started using it myself for navigating and dictating on my home computer) and will continue to improve<\/li>\n<li>+ a search engine<\/li>\n<li>+ a whole lot of aps for different functions, with associated metadata which can be matched against what the user&#8217;s asked for.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The computer, like a librarian, doesn&#8217;t have to know everything, it just needs to know where to find everything.  Ask it a calculating-type question and it gets a Wolfram|Alpha-style widget that can calculate the answer.  Ask it an encyclopaedic-type question and it brings you an answer from a Wikipedia-type source.  Ask it to convert your word processing document into pdf and it finds the appropriate ap to do that.  Tell it you want a pizza, it finds the aps from the local pizza places, asks (or remembers) your price\/quality\/toppings preferences, and places the order for you.  In due course, your doorbell rings.<\/p>\n<p>I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if something like this was working within five years.  I also wouldn&#8217;t be overly surprised if it wasn&#8217;t; while we&#8217;ve got all the pieces, gluing it together mightn&#8217;t be quite so straightforward as an idealist would think.<\/p>\n<p><b>2.<\/b>Dynamic\/adaptive website navigation.  For sprawling websites:  instead of having the traditional static navigation links, have the server generate the links based on the most popular recent destinations for visitors to the same page.<\/p>\n<p>This one&#8217;s easier to program (I think, if I put the work in, I could come up with a clunky implementation myself) &#8211; you just need server-side scripting with access to stats of a) links clicked and b) keywords searched.  I&#8217;d weight keywords searched a bit higher than links clicked (partly to keep things dynamic but mostly because people will tend to click a link first if it looks even halfway relevant, so just the fact of searching will indicate that the current links are useless).<\/p>\n<p>So when you go to (say) the uni library&#8217;s homepage at the start of term it&#8217;ll show links to the catalogue, and tutorials, and computer workrooms.  Towards exam time people will start searching for &#8220;past exam papers&#8221; so that&#8217;ll soon appear on the homepage, while &#8220;tutorials&#8221; will drop off, but people will click the &#8220;computer workrooms&#8221; more so that&#8217;ll stay on.<\/p>\n<p>There are obvious downsides to this approach.  Confusion about links shifting around, for one.  Also ideally it should be customisable so postgrads can see a view which isn&#8217;t overwhelmed by the preferences of undergraduates for most of the year.  But.  It would be interesting.  I&#8217;d like to try it sometime (or see someone else try it).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1.You know in sf you get to say &#8220;Oh hi computer, calculate this for me \/ find me information about this thing \/ make me some hot Earl Grey tea!&#8221; and the computer says &#8220;Sure thing, my friend!&#8221; and does it? Here&#8217;s how that could work in the near future: speech recognition &#8211; this is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[129,26,27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}