Umbral Echoes Blog

I was just thinking today, that often when I’m talking online and someone mentions something that I’ve never heard of, I just quickly Google it. Unfortunately, you can’t do this in face to face conversations. But… wouldn’t it be great if you could

So I started thinking about what it would take to do that. The technology for it definitely isn’t there yet, but it’s getting surprisingly close. Here’s how it would work. As you converse, the system is constantly listening in with speech recognition software, as well as scanning your brain. The software running in the background is also constantly filtering for items of interest, separating out keywords from the conversation.

So let’s say someone mentions Plato’s allegory of the cave in conversation, saying how citizens here are seeing a shadow of what war really is. You’ve heard of the allegory of the cave, but you aren’t really familiar with it. So you have an, “I wish I knew what that was,” moment. The brain scanner detects this. The software looks for the most recent keywords, gets “allegory of the cave.” It has a built-in Wikipedia-like database, and brings up a nutshell synopsis of the allegory of the cave onto your contact lens HUD. Now you seem erudite.

Of course, this could be implemented in a simpler way, without the brain scanner and contextual speech recognition, too. My friend Grem suggested a subvocalizer — maybe you just subvocalize, “look up allegory of the cave,” and it does so. That would also prevent false positives, so you’d only get displays of things you specifically request.

And since the entirety of Wikipedia fits into 2 GB, you wouldn’t even have to have an Internet connection. So really, this technology is all almost ready. The main thing would be the contact-lens HUD, which is still in early development.