I was thinking about making this a twitter, but it might sound weird without some proper explanation. The basic premise is that I want more devices to talk to me. But more importantly, it needs to sense what is going on.
It sounds sci-fi, but I would enjoy waking up every morning, telling my omni-device good morning and it would proceed to list a bunch of useful information…
“Good morning Anthony, its March 10th, its 45 degrees outside with a high today of 65. Yesterday your portfolio went down 4%. Your solar array output at work was 5% over nominal, and you might want to look at inverter number 13A, it seems lower than the others. There are currently no accidents or major traffic jams on your drive to work…”
Seriously, I want my information spoon fed to me – its not like I need to open up five different web pages to collate this information. Its frustrating that someone hasn’t done it and commercialized it yet.
I guess part of it is data availability. To do something like this, I would need an internet-connected alarm clock and a speech synthesis engine. It would grab XML files from all over the place, providing authorizations as needed (e.g. my stock portfolio), and gather the necessary data and putting it into sentences that tell me whats going on. If XML files don’t exist for that data (road conditions for example), then it cant provide me that information. It could be integrated with a central calendaring solution so that it’ll tell me if I have meetings or appointments to be at. You would need some software on a stand-alone computer to program it with what data to pull down.
Microphones in the unit would not only listen to my voice but also use them as an ambient noise sensor that would adjust the output volume (if its a quiet room, it doesn’t need to be so loud). If the alarm goes off and it doesn’t detect anyone in the room then it should turn it off – I’m either not home or dead =^(. So yea, thats the odd-ball idea for today. There are talking alarm clocks, but I haven’t seen one that can read and digest XML feeds and give you information like that.
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