All projects: Gel, Jobs, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Blog, Bit Literacy
Ease-of-use and color printers
Xerox Innovation Lab is trying to make it easier to use color printers - specifically, by using "natural language processing" to interpret users' commands. That's been a holy grail of AI researchers for years, and there are still some potential hiccups... from Teaching the Color Printer the Language of Humanity and a Palette of Precision:
Say particular users keep typing, “no, darker” when they ask for chartreuse. “The machine will respond with a color chart that shows what it views as chartreuse, and then will let the user show what he means by the word,” Mr. Woolfe said. If it turns out the user thinks chartreuse is forest green, the software will act accordingly from then on.
A great plan for Xerox, until you try to share the printer with other users. I have a jacket that I swear is blue, but my wife always corrects me that it's black. And what happens when I'm expecting forest green but my colleague has set the printer to output chartreuse?
I guess that's why it's called a holy grail: subjectivity (of a user) and objectivity (of a machine) will probably never be cozy bedmates.