Cognitive devices

The Feature this week has an article about Cognitve Radio, by which it means wireless devices that can intelligently make decisions based on their context.

Why is it that when people talk about personalised devices in the future, they always decide that they’ll be like pets, or that they’ll have personalities? That implies that you’ll have to be careful when you first buy the device, to make sure you get one with a personality you like… I think the devices will just be highly personalised, but you will be able to change the ways in which they’re personalised whenever you like, and the device will suggest changing its settings to better suit you, but that’s just good user-interface - no-one claims that Windows XP has a personality, but it offers similar (if much more basic) suggestions like “you haven’t used these desktop icons ever, do you want me to get rid of them”.

And isn’t it about time America got RDS? I’m afraid that to us Europeans (Brits at least), being able to listen to a CD and then get interrupted by traffic reports in our car just isn’t a big deal!

Anyway, some good ideas for ways that my personal devices should work, but I’m not convinced we have to wait 10-15 years and for speech recognition before we can start implementing some of them.