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September 13, 2005
Where Will we Be
A question:
What do you think computing will look like in 10 years. in 1995 we got netscape and since then we've seen tremendous change, innovation, wierdness, failure, and some notably interesting successes. We literally do things differently now.
I am at Ubicomp 2005 in Tokyo just now and had an interesting situation arise. I wanted to order room service the other night. The menu was in Kana and English.
But the hotel staff in room service did not know what the spoken English meant and I did not know how to pronounce the Kana even phonetically. The menu was useless for non-japanese speakers using it over the phone.
I was about to take it downstairs and point to what I wanted when I had a thought. I quickly googled for Japanese translation sites and found JEDI, the Japanese-English Dictionary Interface which would translate my English into Romaji, the Latin alphabet phonetic representation of Japanese. I called room service back and now ordered my dish reading the phonetic syllables printed in Roman letters on my laptop screen.
It worked and I succesfully had dinner that night.
We couldn't do that 10 years ago...
So how will information technology be delivered, packaged, consumed in 2015?
All comments welcome.
Bill
Comments
A paper menu, and an audio telephone... it should have been a touchscreen TV connected to their ordering system, that would have been good...?
I absolutely agree. I am amazed at how long it has taken to get hotels to upgrade information systems for guests. Where I am now is a hotel built in 1955 (like me) and they have moved to a flatscreen (plasma or lcd) tv, but the phone looks like it was installed in 1960.
My room has a high speed internet cable link, but the hotel only offers those in a few rooms and wireless in the lobby only.
But I would LOVE to see a TV-based room service menu...ordering over the phone is one of th emost frustrating experiences, often because of language barriers but also just because of a lack of visual reference.
Bill
All right... so, we've got our work cut out for us, I guess.... ;-)
(Seriously, I'm looking forward to what we might be able to do in the future, uniting the various media types and making them accessible to designers worldwide... very exciting time.) (uh, I *can* admit that without getting into trouble with various oversight agencies, right? ;-)
John
Again I agree...we certainly have our work cut out for us. I contend that one of the biggest challenges for software designers and engineers in the near future is to make the next set of "you'll never get a program to do that well" tasks automated and accessible to people who don't have time to be experts at it.
We need simpler interfaces to specify more and more comlex tasks and we need systems and products that take us beyond the ability to work with multiple media types to a place where the systems themselves can do a lot of the work.
The analogy I see is between the old way of page layout before automation and the advent of desktop publishing. But now it needs to be applied to multiple media types and have even more cognitive abilities.
I look forward to meeting you in the not to distant future...sounds like we'll have some things to discuss.
Bill