[ExI] google translator

[BillK]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 4:55 AM, spike wrote:
<snip>
> Something we used to discuss a long time ago, we are now seeing for the
> first time: the elderly computer users being left behind.  My mother has
> been a computer user for almost 40 years now, owned a PDP 11-780 for an
> accounting business back in the early 70s.  Now she is being overwhelmed by
> the pace of change in operating systems.  It has long been a worry to me
> that we don't do enough to make technology accessible for the superannuated.
>
> IBM's Jeopardy-playing Watson exercise makes me confident we will soon have
> computers that operate via voice command, or respond to conversation, to be
> an acceptable companion for the elderly.  They should: we have good voice
> recognition, we have good inference software.  I would think we could
> already do as good as a semi-senile nursing home cohabitant for a software
> based companion for the elderly.
>
> Some of you coding hipsters who know from conversational software, how far
> out is this now?  Five years?  Ten?  Why don't we have stereos and TVs set
> up to where we just tell it what we want, and it goes off and does it?  Why
> do we need to learn its language instead of it learning ours?
>
>

Several different subjects combined here.

First.
No, I don't think voice operated computers will ever appear in general use.
Think about it. What happens when you get a group of people all
shouting at their handheld computers? It's bad enough listening to
other people's mobile phone conversations.
There is a place for specialised applications such as voice
recognition entry systems.

Second.
Old computer users fall into two groups. Old expert users and old general users.

Old general users only want a few applications. Their main interest is
annoying their relatives. ;) So just email, Facebook chat and photos,
perhaps online banking and news browsing.
The new Chrome OS laptops or even tablet computers makes this very easy to do.
<http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/googles-chrome-os-putting-everything-in-the-browser-window/>

Old expert users have the knowledge to pick and choose what they want.
Most are just not interested in living in a world of continual gossip.
So Facebook, texting, IMS, even mobile phones, get little used. They
will probably have a small laptop that multiboots several systems
depending on what they feel like playing with. They will be fixing
*your* computer problems!


BillK