Google Now does precisely this, alerting you when traffic situations have changed and you need to leave earlier than expected. When it works, it's pretty cool; when it doesn't, it's quite annoying.
Okay, I haven't used Google Now, but my impression is that it's crucially different from my suggestion in one important way: in my description, the user, on creating an appointment, is asked if they want to, effectively, register the event with the Google-Now-Equivalent, and that the Google-Now-Equivalent only does this with the appointments so booked, but all of the appointments so booked; and that meanwhile Google Now does whatever the hell it feels like, and you have no control over it. Am I wrong about that?
ETA: I'm under the impression that Google Now attempts to anticipate the user and their wants without having to be told, consequently behaving like a domineering alcoholic mother: it is sure it knows what you want better than you do, but pays attention to half the wrong things, abandons you half the time, and doesn't accept correction or even input.
It seems to be there's a vast, unexplored application space between the standard "user must micromanage the application at a level only several abstraction barriers away from expressing it in assembly" and the aspirational "application reads user's mind".
I want my applications to behave like excellent executive assistants: they wait for orders and then handle what I told them to for me. I want to be able to express specific things precisely at a higher level of abstraction, and have the app take it from there. The app doesn't need to divine my intentions from the tea leaves of my inbox. It really doesn't.
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Date: 2017-07-19 03:21 am (UTC)Okay, I haven't used Google Now, but my impression is that it's crucially different from my suggestion in one important way: in my description, the user, on creating an appointment, is asked if they want to, effectively, register the event with the Google-Now-Equivalent, and that the Google-Now-Equivalent only does this with the appointments so booked, but all of the appointments so booked; and that meanwhile Google Now does whatever the hell it feels like, and you have no control over it. Am I wrong about that?
ETA: I'm under the impression that Google Now attempts to anticipate the user and their wants without having to be told, consequently behaving like a domineering alcoholic mother: it is sure it knows what you want better than you do, but pays attention to half the wrong things, abandons you half the time, and doesn't accept correction or even input.
It seems to be there's a vast, unexplored application space between the standard "user must micromanage the application at a level only several abstraction barriers away from expressing it in assembly" and the aspirational "application reads user's mind".
I want my applications to behave like excellent executive assistants: they wait for orders and then handle what I told them to for me. I want to be able to express specific things precisely at a higher level of abstraction, and have the app take it from there. The app doesn't need to divine my intentions from the tea leaves of my inbox. It really doesn't.