Have you ever wanted to stand on the bridge of your very own spacecraft and, in a stentorian voice, proudly declaim “Computer? What is the weather in Brooklyn tomorrow?” The Ubi, announced a few years ago and successfully funded to the tune of $229,000, was supposed to offer us this Picardian Utopia of always-on computing and, to a degree, they’ve succeeded.
What does the Ubi do? You simply plug in the device and connect to your WiFi network. Then the Ubi sits quietly, listening to its surroundings, until you say “OK Ubi.” It then uses Android’s built-in voice recognition to perform a few basic searches and reply with the current weather, answers to math and unit problems, and, with a bit of futzing, you can send emails and SMS messages. Does it work? The short answer is “Yes.” The long answer is far more nuanced.
The promise of always-on computing is fascinating. And this device is a clever first step. It’s nicely designed, small enough to hide in an out-of-the-way corner, and, except for a few specific cases, it seems to work. Sadly, what most people want to do with this thing is launch rockets into outer space, ask it to call their parents for them, and control their Nest from the toilet by shouting into the air. These expectations make things considerably more problematic.
Voice activated hardware is difficult to get right – just ask the makers of the Xbox. Things that seem great in theory are ridiculous in practice and given the fact that there are far better ways to interact with a computer than via the difficult-to-understand human voice. Ubi reacts predictably 90% of the time, but it’s that 10% of the time that dumps us into the uncanny valley of frustration.
No comments:
Post a Comment