It’s easy to complain that technology is running our lives, usually a curse not a blessing. But what if we just surrendered and let tech take over everything from monitoring our emails to controlling our daily calendars. Would that be a welcome advantage?
It’s time to start asking that question because a Silicon Valley company and some very smart people behind it are betting that you want technology learn your habits and organize your life.
The company is called reQall and they have developed a voice enabled memory aid that studies your high tech uses and interests and feeds you the information it believes you want. And not just in short email notes, but in actual voice conversation…lots of it. You can hear reQall taking command in a short YouTube video that has been posted about their product.
Interestingly, the concept behind this kind of technology was a vision of consumer colossus Apple back in the mid-1980s. Then Apple CEO John Sculley commissioned a series of ads that envisioned a device called the “Knowledge Navigator” which, as shown in this promotional spot, might as well be the first iPad, twenty plus years before its time.
Whether tech-savvy consumers will eagerly embrace technology that gets to know them quite well and seeks to manage major parts of their busy lives is a tricky call. The tech highway is strewn with the debris of companies who thought their concept couldn’t miss in popularity only to learn that there were lines many of us were just not prepared to cross.
But the reQall website has enough user testimonials from doctors, tennis coaches and a man who uses the product to remind him to move his car to avoid a parking ticket so that one could envision the growth of a real market for a technology that plays to our hourly needs.
The people behind reQall are no lightweights. The Mountain View, CA based company (their HQ is in Moffett Field) was founded by Sunil Vemuri who comes from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab and Rao Machiraju (principal scientist at Apple). Their advisors include Don Norman (former head of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group) and Gordon Bell (DEC & Microsoft).
ReQall has introduced a beta for Android users (called reQall Rover) with an iPhone version to come later. You can try out Rover by going to this link on an Android phone and accessing the app by entering the code “examiner.”
It’s an interesting concept, this notion of technology studying us and then helping to run our lives. Only time will tell if we are ready to hand over the keys.
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