Transparent Technology from Amazon
- by David Dorf
Amazon has been making some interesting moves again, this time in the augmented humanity area. Augmented humanity is about helping humans overcome their shortcomings using technology. Putting a powerful smartphone in your pocket helps you in many ways like navigating streets, communicating with far off friends, and accessing information. But the interface for smartphones is somewhat limiting and unnatural, so companies have been looking for ways to make the technology more transparent and therefore easier to use.
When Apple helped us drop the stylus, we took a giant leap forward in simplicity. Using touchscreens with intuitive gestures was part of the iPhone's original appeal. People don't want to know that technology is there -- they just want the benefits. So what's the next leap beyond the touchscreen to make smartphones even easier to use?
Two natural ways we interact with the world around us is by using sight and voice. Google and Apple have been using both in their mobile platforms for limited uses cases. Nobody actually wants to type a text message, so why not just speak it? Any if you want more information about a book, why not just snap a picture of the cover? That's much more accurate than trying to key the title and/or author.
So what's Amazon been doing? First, Amazon released a new iPhone app called Flow that allows iPhone users to see information about products in context. Yes, its an augmented reality app that uses the phone's camera to view products, and overlays data about the products on the screen. For the most part it requires the barcode to be visible to correctly identify the product, but I believe it can also recognize certain logos as well. Download the app and try it out but don't expect perfection. Its good enough to demonstrate the concept, but its far from accurate enough. (MobileBeat did a pretty good review.) Extrapolate to the future and we might just have a heads-up display in our eyeglasses.
The second interesting area is voice response, for which Siri is getting lots of attention. Amazon may have purchased a voice recognition company called Yap, although the deal is not confirmed. But it would make perfect sense, especially with the Kindle Fire in Amazon's lineup.
I believe over the next 3-5 years the way in which we interact with smartphones will mature, and they will become more transparent yet more important to our daily lives. This will, of course, impact the way we shop, making information more readily accessible than it already is. Amazon seems to be positioning itself to be at the forefront of this trend, so we should be watching them carefully.
