(2016-04-23) Li Earbud Interface

Jon Li ponders an Audio/EarBud Inter Face.

I came to this realization 17 years after my chairlift conversation. When Chikai Ohazama, formerly an EIR at Google Ventures and co-founder of KeyHole, told me about a $13 (EGRD) Blue Tooth EarBud he tested (and actually liked)... I incorporated it into my daily life as much as possible. In the mornings: listening to NPR, cycling to music, driving to meetings using Google Map directions, and “reading” articles using a hack shared by M G Siegler ("the real key is to enable ‘Speak Screen’ which allows you to quickly trigger the contents of any screen to be read to you simply by swiping two fingers down on an iOS screen"). At night: commuting home from work, talking to family, cooking to a podcast, falling asleep to music as my girlfriend lay in bed with no idea that I had a computer in my ear.

An in-ear smart device can be more intimate than a phone or smartwatch (Always On You). The device lends itself to a new relationship — not too different than the operating system Samantha in the movie “Her” — to information and the people or bots delivering the information. Over time, I found myself to be more “in my head” while wearing the device, thinking or having discussions with myself (or a bot) even when nothing was playing.

As Chikai and I mused about our $13 experiments, we settled on the hypothesis that only the major hardware and software companies, like Apple and Google, can fully integrate an in-ear technology with our phones, homes, and cars. The user experience is otherwise too fragmented or niche (e.g. Doppler’s Here device). I even have a wish list: iPhone 7 with Bluetooth EarPods; Siri becomes an open platform for developers (like Amazon’s Alexa); IMessage becomes an open platform for developers (like Slack, Messenger, Telegram).

I Commented.

He doesn't talk about Voice Control. I think there's less app support for this.

I bought the same EarBud to play with.

A challenge with it reading to me is that I like to HighLight.

I'm using InstaPaper's Speak feature with LongReads where I don't expect to need HighLighting.

Update: MoonReader also has TextToSpeech feature, so I've listened to some chapters. (I'm doing this and InstaPaper during the Walking portion of my Commute.)

I'd love an RssAggregator that could start reading to me, then let me Skip and/or Save.