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FTA: -- “Our robot had many features that still haven’t been duplicated today,” Fowler recalled. “We had an autonomous robot that could self navigate, plug itse

FTA: -- “Our robot had many features that still haven’t been duplicated today,” Fowler recalled. “We had an autonomous robot that could self navigate, plug itself in to recharge, speak, sing, play music, recite poetry, recognize commands and a bunch of other features. We programmed it to act as an alarm clock, security guard, entertainer and tutor for the kids. It was very advanced. But when people asked us ‘What can it do?’ and we would list its capabilities, they would always scoff. -- We see this cycle repeat over and over again in almost every area of tech, and so rarely do we learn from it. What Mr. Fowler failed to grasp was that people weren't interested in buying a robot that had 'features', they wanted one that provided utility. At the end of the day their lack of utility made these robots toys - very expensive, klunky, difficult to use, and unreliable toys. Heed me children - when building something, focus on utility over cool features. Solve a problem, and make it easy to use and the world will beat a path to your doorstep.

digikata 8y ago
The first robot that can scrape dishes for the dishwasher, then take them out and put them away when clean is going to be a huge hit.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  The dishwasher is that robot. Just call the racks in the dishwasher shelves. Job done.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    If you've got a big enough kitchen, having a clean dishwasher and a dirty one is a huge convenience.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Dishwashers don't currently handle solid waste well; instead of composting the non-liquid material it's all flushed down the drain, which is both bad for the drain (that grease adds up!) and a loss of the composting that would occur when you manually scrape off a dish.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Does anyone sell a dishwasher where the racks lift out to put away in a cupboard: so you can fill a rack, lift the cleaned rack out the washer and put it away, put the dirty rack of dishes in the washer to clean; rinse and repeat.
    - zdw 8y ago
      A lot of commercial dishwashers have multiple trays - they're integrated into a counter and have two guillotine doors that lift up, allow a new unwashed tray to be slid in one side, while the previous washed one slides out the other side. If you're washing hundreds or thousands of dishes for lunch or dinner rush, this assembly line is the way to do it.
  - stevehawk 8y ago
    #bachelorlife 2 dishwashers and just move the dishes back and forth as one is the 'dirty' one and one is the 'clean' one
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  I'm still waiting for a full cycle washing/drying/folding laundry machine. I'm happy to rfid/index all my clothes if it gets me there...
  - digikata 8y ago
    I wish they would at least get to the next half step. Put clothes in the laundry machine, it washes and dries them in the same machine, then buzzes to say it's done. Unfortunately that seems to be a very niche appliance that maybe shows up in some RVs.
    - coddingtonbear 8y ago
      I've heard that they're common in Europe, actually! Just that they also don't dry well.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        You can get some OK ones, but they're expensive. Miele makes the one I have and I'm completely happy with it (comes with full remote control from an app as well).
tootie 8y ago
I had some very accurate voice recognition software on my Windows 3.1 Tandy in 1995 or so. I also played VR games around that same time. The tech has been minimally viable for a very long time. It's the user experience that's evolved and frankly it hasn't evolved all that much.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  If anything it's evolved backwards, this 80s bot was doing all those things on its own, without the cloud. And yet now on-device compute isn't enough and everything requires cloud proce$$ing
- Eridrus 8y ago
  This is some revisionist history right here. Speech recognition has gotten dramatically better since 1995. It now works with cheap mics, without per-speaker training, across the room, in noisy environments, with large vocabularies and low error rates. The problem with this article is that all of this tech is not a binary yes/no feature, but rather work with varying levels of success in various situations. It also says ridiculous things like "Unlike today’s conversational interfaces, the Gemini took voice commands in an english-like programming language called VOCOL." as if that is a good thing, compared to these interfaces being usable in ambiguous natural language.
  - tootie 8y ago
    I was using an early version of Dragon by Nuance which is still active. It used a cheap commodity microphone and hardware that, while expensive at the time, was maybe 10% as powerful as a typical modern phone. And having built a public-space voice system very recently, I can tell you that it's still really difficult to pull off and definitely requires specialty AV equipment and professional installation. The problem then as now is that if it's not 100% accurate, you still need to be doing manual correction which is very time-consuming. And typing was never really a broken system that needed help.

digikata 8y ago

The first robot that can scrape dishes for the dishwasher, then take them out and put them away when clean is going to be a huge hit.

sandworm101 8y ago
The dishwasher is that robot. Just call the racks in the dishwasher shelves. Job done.
- notatoad 8y ago
  If you've got a big enough kitchen, having a clean dishwasher and a dirty one is a huge convenience.
- drb91 8y ago
  Dishwashers don't currently handle solid waste well; instead of composting the non-liquid material it's all flushed down the drain, which is both bad for the drain (that grease adds up!) and a loss of the composting that would occur when you manually scrape off a dish.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Does anyone sell a dishwasher where the racks lift out to put away in a cupboard: so you can fill a rack, lift the cleaned rack out the washer and put it away, put the dirty rack of dishes in the washer to clean; rinse and repeat.
  - zdw 8y ago
    A lot of commercial dishwashers have multiple trays - they're integrated into a counter and have two guillotine doors that lift up, allow a new unwashed tray to be slid in one side, while the previous washed one slides out the other side. If you're washing hundreds or thousands of dishes for lunch or dinner rush, this assembly line is the way to do it.
- stevehawk 8y ago
  #bachelorlife 2 dishwashers and just move the dishes back and forth as one is the 'dirty' one and one is the 'clean' one
kasey_junk 8y ago
I'm still waiting for a full cycle washing/drying/folding laundry machine. I'm happy to rfid/index all my clothes if it gets me there...
- digikata 8y ago
  I wish they would at least get to the next half step. Put clothes in the laundry machine, it washes and dries them in the same machine, then buzzes to say it's done. Unfortunately that seems to be a very niche appliance that maybe shows up in some RVs.
  - coddingtonbear 8y ago
    I've heard that they're common in Europe, actually! Just that they also don't dry well.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      You can get some OK ones, but they're expensive. Miele makes the one I have and I'm completely happy with it (comes with full remote control from an app as well).

tootie 8y ago

I had some very accurate voice recognition software on my Windows 3.1 Tandy in 1995 or so. I also played VR games around that same time. The tech has been minimally viable for a very long time. It's the user experience that's evolved and frankly it hasn't evolved all that much.

tomc1985 8y ago
If anything it's evolved backwards, this 80s bot was doing all those things on its own, without the cloud. And yet now on-device compute isn't enough and everything requires cloud proce$$ing
Eridrus 8y ago
This is some revisionist history right here. Speech recognition has gotten dramatically better since 1995. It now works with cheap mics, without per-speaker training, across the room, in noisy environments, with large vocabularies and low error rates. The problem with this article is that all of this tech is not a binary yes/no feature, but rather work with varying levels of success in various situations. It also says ridiculous things like "Unlike today’s conversational interfaces, the Gemini took voice commands in an english-like programming language called VOCOL." as if that is a good thing, compared to these interfaces being usable in ambiguous natural language.
- tootie 8y ago
  I was using an early version of Dragon by Nuance which is still active. It used a cheap commodity microphone and hardware that, while expensive at the time, was maybe 10% as powerful as a typical modern phone. And having built a public-space voice system very recently, I can tell you that it's still really difficult to pull off and definitely requires specialty AV equipment and professional installation. The problem then as now is that if it's not 100% accurate, you still need to be doing manual correction which is very time-consuming. And typing was never really a broken system that needed help.