Digital Technology Rendering Physical Technology Unusable
Overly complex household tech, with low cost miniature touch sensitive control displays is a nightmare for vision impaired users. But there’s a great opportunity for an AI assistant to guide the user, combining information from online sources with a first person view from smart glasses.
I grew up in the 1960s in a family of 5 vision impaired children, All of whom went on to secure great academic results, good jobs and stable relationships. My mother attributed this remarkable feat of child development to her extreme policy of ‘no molly coddling’. For me this meant using a woodcutter’s axe at age 10, using an electric saw at age 12 and a hedge trimmer at age 13. My mother’s seeming disregard for our sight impairment would surely be viewed now as reckless disregard for Health & Safety, but it undoubtedly helped make me who I am today, and hey, I still have all my fingers and no permanent scars to show for it.
However, this post is not about AI helping vision impaired thrill seekers to master power tools in a particularly niche alternative to the simultaneously silly and dangerous sport of Extreme Ironing. The physical technology I’m considering is much more mundane including high end coffee machines, microwaves, gym equipment and washing machines – the stuff of our daily lives.
There was a time when microwaves had chunky buttons and rotary dials, washing machines had only two settings and high end coffee machines came equipped with their own professional voice activated living and breathing barista.
But the modern home seems over populated with devices that allegedly improve our quality of life while actually inspiring violent retribution on the device itself, its maker or whoever thought it would make a nice Xmas present. And the worst part of course is that when the generous relative comes to visit 2 years later, you have to drag the sodding solar powered ice cream maker from under the stairs, dust it off and casually serve up mulberry mascarpone semifreddo as if it was part of your normal day relaxing at home.
The thing that makes all these gizmos so challenging for the vision impaired is the sheer number of options and settings they have, all selected through a touch screen, sometimes without even a single tactile button.
To be fair our home Nespresso machine is almost entirely idiot proof and our talking bathroom scales are accurate, clear and even polite. But there are two scenarios where I would love an AI assistant that could see the device that is baffling me, read the instructions online and then talk me step by step through the job on hand.
- Even at home, we have several household devices such as the microwave, the mesh network and the washing machine, where visual status indicators and touch screen controls render the device unusable by me unaided.
- Increasingly when I visit an unfamiliar hotel room the coffee machine, the AC and sometimes even the lights and curtains are unusable without sighted help because they are all controlled through snazzy little touch screens.
Hobson’s focus right now is the purely digital world of calendars, emails, X feeds, web searching and online shopping. But I am excited about Hobson ultimately intermediating the increasingly visual interfaces to physical technology. Here’s the user journey:
- Me [Wearing my smart glasses]: Hobson, can you recognise this device and find the instructions?”
- Hobson: “Yes, it’s a Brewdini™ Quantum BeanCraft 9000. What can I help you with?”
- Me: “Unsurprisingly you can help me make a cup of coffee.”
- Hobson: “Place a cup in the machine, then move your hand slowly over the display and I will guide you through selection of the bean origin, variety, grind size, strength, brewing temperature, brewing pressure and froth emoji. Apparently the SL28 Natural Fermented Honey-Processed Anaerobic Micro-Lot is very popular amongst the Shoreditch hipsters right now.”
- Me [sighing]: “Please tell me there’s an ‘FFS, I just want a bloody coffee’ button and guide me to it”
Even if they have mastered the daily use of all their household devices, there may be millions of sighted people who would love to converse with Hobson to get their recalcitrant domestic device set up, re-configured or just plain re-booted. And maybe the challenges of devices in unfamiliar hotels are not exclusive to the vision impaired and everyone, sighted or not, young or old, could benefit from an assistant who could calmly tell them what to do. Not quite as good as having a charming member of staff to actually do it for you, but then again, we can’t all stay at Claridges.