I immediately thought, "oh, like Jelly?" when I read the tagline but Ask OOLOO uses voice instead of text and photos.
I'm confident voice will be an increasingly used technology interface in the coming years (and not just because I saw the movie Her). It has its cons but dictation is often much faster than typing. Considering how much time we slap the keyboard every day, even a 20% reduction in time-to-communicate would have a huge impact on productivity and likely encourage more social interaction (which continues to increase).
@rrhoover (continuing my comment from Twitter) So I'm willing to bet thought interfaces will become mainstream before voice. When you think about it, speaking takes a *lot* of effort, which is why dictation systems have still not replaced the keyboard, even as the technology as become perfected.
There have been a number of recent stories on advancement of detecting brain waves to complete tasks (e.g. http://www.cnet.com/news/mind-pi...). The brain is an electrical organ and it's not hard to believe that we will be able to improve the ability to "think" commands that can be detected by a computer sensor.
For the alarmists out there, this isn't "mind reading" -- rather, it's the ability to consciously think a command that is intercepted and understood by a computer.
This will beat voice for a number of reasons beyond the physical effort to speak: no "cross talk" or interference from nearby speakers, no "filtering" mechanism to cut out ambient noises, no ridiculously complex deciphering of accents, vocal timbre, slurring, etc. Instead of building a system that can understand *any* voice, users learn a "thought pattern" to communicate with the computer.
My hunch is this technology will lead to people become more and more efficient and communicating more complex commands to an ever more sensitive and tuned expert system -- and voila, mind controlled computers!
@dannyjespinoza you bring up some interesting ideas. However voice would still be a likley precursor to brain-interface systems. A company called Emotiv have been in this spsce for a while now and have limited traction from the developer community mostly due to tech limitation but probably mainly lack of consumer demand..
@acondurache totally agree voice will come first technology-wise, but will come second with respect to widespread consumer adoption. Siri and Google Now have been around forever in tech time and nobody really uses these services. People just don't like to talk to computers.
@dannyjespinoza@acondurache I can't wait for this day but it's also slightly frightening. We're slowly becoming cyborgs and as a result it's changing the way we interact with each other.
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I like the idea of voice, too, but tried this out a few times; the idea of Q&A on the go, particularly for qualitative / contextual questions is exciting. For the few I tried, the answers have all just been taken from what looks like the what is the first google result for each question I asked. Maybe this is because my questions were googleable but I don't think this really becomes interesting until the answers aren't just the first paragraph from the first google result for my question?
Maybe this is more a testament to the medium, and speaks to @rrhoover first point - voice feels more personal / intimate and thus I expect a more nuanced answer to a voice based query than a text query I'd throw into google? Either way, think this is really cool foundation as an app - I'm fascinated by all the Q&A platforms sprouting up, could be a nice augmentation to typical search that works better on a smart phone on th go.
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