REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE
It’s really easy to get in touch with me. You can call me on my land line, or you can text me or call me on my cell phone. If that doesn’t work send me a message through Xanga, or leave a comment on my MySpace or Facebook page or even classmates.com. You could also leave a message for me at my registered domain name at www.marklabouff.com. If that doesn’t work, send me an email at my personal email address or at my work email address, or any one of 10 other email addresses I’ve had over the last several years and have abandoned but probably still work except that I never check them. Or you could call me at work and leave me a voice message which (since we have VOIP) interfaces directly with Outlook and sends it to me as a .wav file attachment to an email so I can pick it up wherever I am on my Treo. You could try something as old fashioned as sending me a fax, cause when you do it transmits it digitally to my Treo as well so that I can look at it with the built in document viewer. Or you could do what I’ve started doing lately and call jott.com and leave a voice mail which is transcribed into an email and sent to one of my email addresses or as a text message to my phone. Of course I also have a Cisco IP Communicator on my desktop which emulates the phone in the office, so if I’m on the road I can plug in a headset and pick up voice mail messages and maybe even give you call back directly through my laptop. If you happen to have video conferencing capability, I’ll give you the IP address at my office and we can set up an muti-point high definition video conference. If you happen to miss the conference it will be recorded and stored on a server via Media Site Live and you can go back and watch it at your convenience.
I’m so friggin’ connected to the universe that I haven’t had an actual face to face conversation with a real human being in at least six months.
There is a new technology that is being developed that puts everything listed above to shame. I swear I’m not making this up. It seems that when you think about saying a word, even if you don’t say it out loud, impulses are sent from your brain to your vocal cords. A device is being developed that fits around your neck and reads these impulses. The device then transcribes those impulses into the words they represent and can then send that out as a cell phone call. If the person you are calling is wearing a bluetooth earpiece they, of course, can hear the call without actually picking up the phone. If they are also wearing the neck device it’s possible to carry on a conversation without actually physically saying a word. Is that creepy or what? (Here’s a video)
The implications for this technology are mind boggling. Can you imagine two people in an office having a conversation with their boss? While their boss is talking, they are secretly having the following conversation: “What a moron.” “I swear to God his breath could stop a buffalo at thirty yards.” “I heard he’s sleeping with Janet, his administrative assistant.” “Really, ‘cause I heard he’s sleeping with Carl from accounting.” “Want to knock off early and grab a beer?” “Yeah, you fake a heart attack and when he stops talking to go call an ambulance we can make a run for it.”
Apparently the system has only learned to transcribe about 150 words so it has a very limited real world application right now, but you know its going to be available on your I-Phone in about two years.
So what do you think? Is all of this technology really helping you communicate, or is it just getting in the way?