[Sigia-l] Brilliant or doomed?

[Andrew Boyd]

On 5/2/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> ...if Xerox has its way, that will not be true much longer. This week the
> company introduced the software equivalent of a translator that can turn
> plain color speech into fluent computerese. Type the command, ³Make the sun
> a brighter yellow,² and the printer will read, ³Go with color CIELAB[88, -3,
> 64].²
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/technology/02xerox.html>
>
> What other natural language UIs can you think of for long-standing, thorny
> user interaction problems?

Not a UI (yet) but a colleague (Matthew Hodgson) is working on a way
to turn scary-bad medical restriction text into something
machine-useable using semantic modeling. As a byproduct it will be
more human-parseable. He spoke about it at the last Canberra IA
Cocktail Hour and all present were pretty impressed. So far so good,
but the design work is not complete so it is too early to tell.

If you want an example of how scary restriction text can get, please go to:
http://www.pbs.gov.au/html/healthpro/search/results?term=etanercept

..and click on any of the "Authority required" links. This is an
extreme case but is one of hundreds of similar items. Eventually we
hope to make use of the back-end restriction modeling work by
providing this kind of information as a browse facet or two.

Cheers, Andrew

---
Andrew Boyd
http://skonkwerks.net/facibusreviews