{"id":1742,"date":"2014-08-07T01:26:46","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T06:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1742"},"modified":"2014-07-21T07:36:19","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T12:36:19","slug":"searching-for-the-digital-assistant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2014\/08\/searching-for-the-digital-assistant\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for the Digital Assistant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>A social robot is the last in a long line of attempts at building a digital assistant. Maybe we should just hire people to be personal assistants?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I stumbled across this little &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/future_tense\/2014\/07\/16\/social_robotics_expert_cynthia_breazeal_debuts_jibo_a_family_robot.html\">social robot<\/a>.&#8221; It talks to you when you talk to it. It makes phone calls for you. It takes pictures for you. It keeps your calendar for you. Isn&#8217;t it wonderful? Maybe it is wonderful. I&#8217;ve never seen one in person or used one.<\/p>\n<p>It is, however, not a new idea. It is yet another attempt at the digital assistant. That magic thing that helps you do all the things that you do or want to do.<\/p>\n<p>At work, the digital assistant will do something when I say:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Arrange a meeting of all the people interested in project ABC.<\/li>\n<li>Collate all my notes from last week into a report.<\/li>\n<li>Categorize that pile of receipts on my desk.<\/li>\n<li>Find John Jones and get him in my office right now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At home, the digital assistant will do something when I say:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Find out what three-year-old girls want for their birthday and order one for my granddaughter.<\/li>\n<li>See what&#8217;s in the fridge and what dish can I make of it.<\/li>\n<li>Tell everyone on the soccer team that practice is cancelled today.<\/li>\n<li>See if I have enough clean clothes for the week.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Is the new social robot in the above link the answer? I doubt it. Perhaps it is a step closer.<\/p>\n<p>And here is a new idea:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Instead of digital assistants, how about we hire all the unemployed as personal assistants?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips A social robot is the last in a long line of attempts at building a digital assistant. Maybe we should just hire people to be personal assistants? I stumbled across this little &#8220;social robot.&#8221; It talks to you when you talk to it. It makes phone calls for you. It takes pictures [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[126],"class_list":["post-1742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1743,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions\/1743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}