The Conversation Piece
October 25th, 2006 by 
lorne
This semester I’m taking IAT 400. It’s a project course where students, “work in teams to develop an artistic or product-based design addressing a complex problem”. My team is working on a digital-picture-frame-like device we’re calling “The Conversation Piece”. Using speech recognition technology, it will eavesdrop on ones conversation, and then display relevant images from a photo-sharing site like Flickr.
One would put this product in a living room, waiting room, or any space where people tend to congregate and chat. As they do, The Conversation Piece will illustrate their dialog, enhancing the conversation and perhaps taking the discussion in new and interesting directions. At the very least, it should give people something to talk about besides the weather.
In another mode, The Conversation Piece will act like a regular digital picture frame, showing photos from ones own Flickr account. This will also make use of the speech interface though for quick and easy navigation. For instance a command like, “Show Lorne” would show pictures from my Flickr account tagged with “Lorne”. The command, “Show Lorne hiking” would show pictures tagged with both “Lorne” and “Hiking”. In this way the product should be simple to use, even for “Grandma” who has little or no computer experience.
