Phone assistants responding to you in the same volume of voice you used to address them.
This would require a way of judging the distance you’re speaking from. Calling out from another room might get a whispered response, and vice versa.
This seems solvable. There are differences in pitch between a nearby whisper and a distant shout.
I agree, but I wouldn’t call it a “no-brainer.”
Maybe not. I’ve heard of apps that can detect mood and I imagine being able to tell that someone is sad from the tone of their voice should be more challenging than picking up the relative difference in inflection, quality of overtone saturation, application of the built in compressor, etc.
Any maps app that, when you set a route, lets you decide “don’t give me any directions until I get to X step” and/or “don’t give any directions after X step”. I dont like hearing the navigation when I don’t need it, and that would save me from having to open or close the navigation while I’m still driving.
Or stop zooming in to the max, leaving me with zero information! The only choice left is to blindly drive into the river when instructed to do so.
It’s been almost 27 years since the first Austin Powers movie and the world still doesn’t have any sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.
Would you settle for ill tempered sea bass?
A better voicemail.
I just re-watched the introduction of the first iPhone, and one thing that stood out to me was this “visual voicemail” thing they showed. To this day I still just get an SMS if someone leaves a message, and then have to call my voicemail and listen to recordings one by one. That’s still the norm for standard phone contracts here afaik, it’s ridiculous!
I didn’t know that was even still a thing. For years now on my iPhone I’ve just looked at the text transcriptions of my voicemail in my phone app.
Now my iPhone, actually transcribes my voicemail live and gives me the opportunity to pick up during them leaving the voicemail. Like old-school answering machines used to do.
That’s odd, Android transcribes my messages by default
Seems to heavily depend on your provider. Some work with the standard phone apps, some have their own apps, but most don’t seem to offer it at all here in Germany. One even sends you an audio MMS instead and just calls that “Visual Mailbox”. It’s crazy to me that such a basic and useful feature still isn’t just a standard thing on all phones.
useful implementation of AI silo’d to the applicable function.
some examples:
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“rename these images with X pattern, add their description to the meta data”
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“correctly capitalize all the names in my address book and tag them by how i know them”
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“show me how much i spent on fast food last month”
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actually good and useful autocorrect / spell check
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find all the emails about Jane’s wedding next year and let me know where we are with the planning
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find me an app for windows desktop that does XYZ
edit to clarify: I know there are algos and LLMs that do this, but I don’t want a “machine” that does all of them, I want a machine that only does each one really well.
LLMs would do all of those incorrectly with 100% confidence.
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Drunk mode for phone. It holds all purchases in a limbo state and pops up with a list to approve or deny at noon the next day.
It also redirects any communication with your ex to an AI bot for the evening.
E2EE phone calls, anyone ?!
I remember helping a friend apply eardrops to his ears due to earwax buildup and thinking “man if these vials had long bendy straw-like tubes then he wouldn’t need someone to lean over his ear applying drops like someone applying cookie flavoring to a cookie.”
You literally turn your head to the side and drop the drops in your ear. You don’t need a second person.
A long bendy straw would require you to squeeze the liquid from the bottle all the way along the straw until the end point. That would mean a larger bottle with a larger amount of liquid for you to be able to squeeze it along the whole length.
Do you actually need someone to help with that?
I just apply ear drops myself, are you sure they didn’t involve you in some kind of ear drop kink 🤔
Microwaves that use directed or reflected waves and to better direct or target energy to specific spots in food. Thermal vision in microwaves and more automated time/power controls.
Why are we still just blasting waves on a spinning dish as high as we can? Like we can pinpoint microwaves for devices with our routers, but we can do it for inside a controlled environment in a box?!
This is my evidence if someone tries to patent this and lock people out of making cool products that I said it here first!
Cost-benefit is not there. You can buy fancy ones that do some such things, but they are expensive.
Routers? Do you mean Wi-Fi routers? Because they certainly don’t pinpoint waves for each device, they send all traffic out in all directions.
Why ‘correct’ someone when their knowledge of a topic so clearly outstrips your own?
I’m happy to accept that I was wrong, in fact this is a very interesting bit of technology! I didn’t intend to be rude, unlike you, clearly.
I’d also like to add that beamforming, despite the name, does not actually involve creating a directed beam. As I described the antenna still sends a signal out in all directions - multiple antennae work together to create an interference pattern with a stronger signal where a device is located. While I wasn’t aware of this technology, it is not as “directed” as the name implies and wouldn’t necessarily have applications inside a microwave oven, especially since the wavelengths used are pretty long, so I don’t think they would not have much flexibility to create the kind of precise pattern that cooking something while skipping the empty space would require.
While the total length of the average Microwave’s wave is about 4.7 - 4.9 inches (12.5 CM) you can further pinpoint the phase of the wave as well both by frequency (playing with that .2 inches in the bandwidth) and phase modulation. This could be further tuned if needed by allowing Microwave ovens to operate in the other ISM band of 5.7 GHZ allowing for 2 inch waves (5.3 CM) or even the 61.25 GHZ band (0.19 inches). Though, as you move up in frequency, you see less penetration as the power is lost faster on the surface of the objects.
Would any of that really make it heat more efficiently though? You’d need at least two magnetrons, some sort of computer vision system, and a computer to do the necessary calculations. Even if you could practically produce an interference pattern that’s better than a single standing wave, I suspect you’d lose more energy than you save.
It might be more efficient though honestly that wouldn’t be MY goal. The main thing would be improving the quality of cooking provided by microwave ovens, less cold centers, burnt outsides, uneven heatings, etc.
RISUG is cheap, permanent, safe, reversible male birth control.
It was invented in 1979, and has not yet come to market.
It’s also completely undetectable to a reproductively abusive partner (clinical term for baby trapping). This allows the person to get their ducks in a row to leave the abusive relationship safely and for good, without alerting the abusive partner OR being trapped into being in some kind of contact for 18 years. By contrast, the closest women have is the depo-provera shot which only lasts 3 months and is arguably the harshest of all hormonal birth control options. RISUG is one of if not the best birth control method we’ve invented to-date, and we’re sleeping on it.
Nested Tags for contacts. Ability to add sub tags like Friends/BowlingGroup or Acquaintance/LocalChurchContact
I seriously don’t understand what’s difficult to tag contacts like this and ability to use them to message a group. It’s a serious no-brainer feature but not to be found anywhere.
As a software engineer I’m interested in the value that would add over simply having combinations of the tags as is possible now
These kind of tags are supported in all kinds of note taking apps. I don’t think it would be an Hercularian task to achieve it.
Don’t underestimate the legacy code. There’s a reason we avoid it.
Contact attached to a knowledge graph seems useful to me :)
Can you give more context or an example. Is it like sort of Obsidian graph but the nodes are all contacts or something?
As an example: https://linkedpeople.net/person/Q358587
But admittedly, I’ve just watched two videos on using Knowledge graphs with WikiData and Obsidian to make a personalized attempt at exobrains with AI, so I am biased to think it’s a good idea in general right now. I really like the idea of not just sorting by tag, but being able to get complex relations out of my personal data, so I can stop having to remember things like “ok so who all is a dev working on this project that would know something about the backend to the search function” and instead use data both available and inputed to get a list of contacts to review. It just gets to be a mess when teams get too large or too many interworking teams! You could extrapolate it to other interpersonal planning and coordination things too like “who would like to play a dungeon crawl for the next few weekends?”, grabbing both calander data where we can, maybe personal notes about whether they can make it to things regularly or be upcoming things for them, and whether they like those kinds of games. Not everything would be known of course, still gotta actually ask people, make a plan, etc, but make it easier you know?
Draino for gutters!
Non rebellious printer
Baby wristlet with heartbeat sensor (this one will make you go proper crazy)
Car that breaks down as soon as you buy it
'cause fuck cars.
Non rebellious printer
They exist they’re called LED Printers, you have to do a bit of searching for them though because they’re often mislabeled as Laser Jet. If you go on Amazon for example and look for laserjet printers in the type box right at the bottom they’ll tell you if it’s really a laser jet or is actually a LED printer. Get an LED printer, Brother makes some good ones.
They are lightning fast even for color printing. They use toner like laser jet (which I guess is where the confusion comes from) but they work in a different way.
Five minute abs
Batteries inside of stove/microwave/coffee machine/etc. with the sole purpose of keeping the time from resetting when it loses power.
I’ve conditioned myself fully by this point to only use the clock on the stove as an indicator of whether my power has or has not gone out
