rengised :: everything technical

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Imagine a Perspective OS

You sit on your computer and turn it on. After logging in, you are greeted by a friendly cartoon character saying "Welcome! How are you today? Here are your computing stuff..." Then there are some colorful boxes that pop up and glide across your screen, each containing important items. But you notice that they are not labelled the way it was supposed to be... it was labeled the way you wanted it! Task lists are labeled "Mah werkz," Activity organizers are labeled "Mah activities," and so on.

So you click your "Paperwerkz" box, and then the cartoon character says to you "What item do you want to open?" You are about to type a word, but decided to talk to the character. You told her "Please open my paper on Research." She responds, "I found three papers on Research. Which would you like to open?" A list of three related papers appear on your screen. You respond, "the paper for Mr. Sanchez." Then she responds, "Ok. Geez! Your paper is larger than I thought! It might take more than 10 seconds to open this one."

After 10 seconds, she says "Hey! your paper is ready! Just tell me if you're ready to print it."
So you do the encoding, but stopped at one word. You forgot the spelling. You ask her, "Is this word spelled correctly?" She says, "I'll check the internet. Do you mean 'Crème brûlée?'"
"Yes! it is!"
"Should I spell it with or without the French punctuations?"
"With French please."
So your document was corrected, and you continue encoding.
All of a sudden, a call came. It was your teacher, telling you to submit your work hora mismo. So you told the cartoon, "Please print this document now!"
"Ok."
You forgot that a friend needed a copy of your document for reference. You told the character "Send the document to Margie."
"Ok. What's the mail subject?"
"Your pick."
"Ok. Do you want to add a message?"
"No."
"Ok. I just sent it."

After cleaning yourself, you decided to bring the printed documents toyour teacher. You told the character,"I'll leave you for a moment. Please sleep for a while, I'll be back. If after two hours I'm not back, please save all my works and turn yourself off."
"Ok. Should I tell others that you left?"
"Yes please."
"Where will you go?"
"To school to pass my work."
"Ok. Bye."

When you leave, your brother arrived.
"Your brother left the house and went to school to pass his work. Will you use the computer?"
"No, ill be doing something."
"Ok."

After three hours, you went back and found your computer turned off.


Software used:

- Linux
- Open Source Speech Recognition software and Ruby.
- XGL/AIGLX
- OpenGL
- ALSA/Enlightenment
- OpenOffice.org
- CUPS
- Aspell + some decent connection to an online dictionary
- Thunderbird

Possible.

somethings missing? Please do make some comments.

2 Comments:

At 3:08 AM , Blogger Bruce said...

What is missing is "continuous speech recognition". Unfortunately, it's not yet available as open source software or even commercial software that will run under Linux. In fact, this is being dictated directly into Firefox using Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance. Otherwise, I can probably accomplish much of what you have listed and in fact I can do pretty much everything by voice with whatever text-to-speech feedback I desire.

Now, reasonably intelligent interaction with the computer is still a ways off. You probably know of the Turing test. So, I cannot interact with the computer as you describe but... sometime.

what is needed? Dragon NaturallySpeaking released in a version that will run under Linux (Wine is not a satisfactory solution) or someone with sufficiently deep pockets to fund the development of continuous speech recognition as free open source software. Mark Shuttleworth?

Anyway, interesting item you wrote. My perspective is that of a 53-year-old quadriplegic who first touched a computer in 1972. I have recently installed Ubuntu on the computers of two friends using VNC. So, I have a least a very limited experience with Linux and somewhat more with computers in general.

 
At 12:36 PM , Blogger nini said...

Hei man!

Its just a perspective, so some 20 years from now who knows, a PC like this may be a typical home computer. No one really knows.

 

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