The problem with to-do lists and
schedules is that you need to fill them out. Now, a new generation of free
online schedulers promises to end that drudgery. These new Web applications use
natural-language processing to interpret spoken commands and ordinary written
sentences to build calendars and personal organizers.
Perhaps the simplest of the new generation
of schedulers is Presdo, based in San Francisco, which launched
in late April to help users collaborate to schedule meetings and other events. Borrowing
from Google’s successful bag of tricks,
Presdo’s home page is as simple as it gets: just a floating text box. Type in “have
brunch with Margaret on Sunday,” and Presdo translates your command into data,
bringing you to a page where you and your guests can check and tweak the
details of your event.
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By taking its cues from the ways that
people naturally talk about time, the software frees users to be general about
dates and times, says Presdo founder Eric Ly. Imprecise phrases
like “next month,” which would be impossible to put on a calendar without
picking a particular date and time, are allowed to stay fluid for as long as
the user wants them to.
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“There’s no widget in our system that looks
anything like a calendar, and that was intentional,” says Ly. “We really wanted
to make it very easy for people to express what they wanted in terms of time.
We felt like the natural-language approach was going to be more flexible and
expressive for users.” If you sign up as a regular user, Presdo will gather
more information to help it guess automatically. For example, it will suggest
restaurants near where you live via Google
Maps, or it will remember Margaret’s e-mail address from your last event
together.
But translating
the vagaries of ordinary speech into data that a computer can understand is a
tough technical problem. “One thing this made me acutely aware of is how
weirdly people speak,” says Rael
Dornfest, developer of IWantSandy,
an online personal-assistant program based in Portland, Oregon,
that uses simple text-based interactions to generate calendar items, to-do
lists, and reminders. “There are little things that are sort of classic. When I
say ‘next week,’ do I mean the week upcoming or the week after that? The
problem is not about parsing. It’s that if you said it to 15 people, half would
interpret it one way, and half the other way.”
Sandy–named after
free-software advocate Tim
O’Reilly’s real-life personal assistant–can intelligently read e-mails,
text messages, and Twitter feeds. Dornfest calls Sandy’s
algorithm “natural-language-ish processing”: it’s basically English, with a few
keywords to help Sandy
recognize common tasks. Telling her to “remind” or “remember” something
generates an automatic e-mail or text-message reminder; adding “@todo” to your
message places it on your to-do list.
By using
ubiquitous communication tools like e-mail and text messaging to interact with Sandy, says Dornfest, users
can get organized without stopping to think too hard about it. “A lot of the
things Sandy
takes down would never have made it into a calendar in your lifetime–it’s just
too painful,” he says. “Most organizational systems break your flow. They try
to make you do something else for a moment, and then you can go back to
whatever you were doing in the first place.”
Another new
program, reQall–developed by QTech, based
in Hyderabad, India–pushes that idea even
further by giving users a toll-free number they can call and leave messages at.
Whatever your favorite communication medium–e-mail, Web, text messaging, or
phone–odds are that reQall can parse it. Voice-recognition software, live
human transcriptionists, and natural-language processing algorithms read your
messages and use them to generate reminders that can be delivered by e-mail,
text messages, or voice calls, customized for the user.
“If I say,
‘Remember to buy a watermelon tomorrow,’ I won’t see it today,” says QTech
founder Sunil Vemuri, who got
the idea for the program while a PhD student researching memory at MIT’s Media Lab. “The system will
interpret the sentence and put it in the right place. It removes some of the
cognitive burdens of trying to get the idea out and organize it.”
Neither Presdo, IWantSandy, nor
reQall has an obvious business model. Their creators are contemplating charging
fees for premium accounts in the future, but for now, all three applications are
free of charge.
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The sudden
popularity of organizers that are just a text message away may be part of a
larger trend. For two decades, software has been dominated by graphical user
interfaces, which employ visual features like windows and icons to convey
information. But clearly, Google isn’t the only company that’s banking on text
entry. The command line is making a comeback–and increasingly,
natural-language processing is bringing the ease and simplicity of text-based
computing to the non-tech-savvy.
“There are going to be more and
more applications which are less monolithic screens, and more dashing off quick
missives,” says Dornfest. “We’ve just begun to scratch the surface here.”