Liquid | Speech
“the ultimate answering machine”
Imagine having the ability to ask questions and get replies in real time, even when the person you are asking is busy, even if the person is a celebrity with millions of fans or even long dead.
Imagine if the single, thoughtful, personal answer given to one person can be given to as many people who are interested, without taking any more time that what it takes to talk to a single person.
Imagine a student being able to ask the greatest teachers, philosophers, artists or scientists specific questions whenever it suits them, and have replies in vivid video.
Imagine workers in a company being able to do this with each other, helping share the valuable knowledge in the organization.
This is what Liquid | Speech provides. The idea is simple: Record short answer as an audio snippet once and let anyone hear it again when they ask the question.
It will be available through a smartphone app and web site.
Use Cases
- Teacher to students
- Scientist to students and general population
- Engineer to students, colleagues and general population
- Video FAQ for companies, even on their websites
- Authors to their readers
- Colleagues to other colleagues
- Politicians to the electorate and to each-other
- Trainers to general population
- Philosophers to students and general population
- Everyday people to other everyday people
- Parent to future older child
- And all of the above, over the generations
Citable
These audio replies will be easily citable to appear in documents.
Mockup
Implementation Notes
The system will use YouTube to store the videos and SoundCloud to store audio (for the audio version) and other Google Services to store the questions the user has not yet answered.
(Future Directions)
The initial scenario is a 'dialogue' with one person, is based on who that person is.
In the future however, the replies can be based on the question, where you can choose who to get the reply from, based on different criteria, such as popularity or location and so on.
Furthermore, geographic tagging can be used to ask questions about places and the user can then choose who to hear the answer from, about the place they are in at the moment.
And even further away, down the generations we will still have access to a dialogue of sorts with those who have gone before us, a few decades ago, or hundreds of years.
Initial Idea (video version)
The initial idea for this project was a video version, as discussed under the name Liquid | Dialogue (I now use the name ‘Dialog’ and it's for a discussion system. I first proposed this in 2016 (and put up web pages in early 2017) as a video answer service but abandoned it after it became clear that very few people can/care about setting up a good lighting system and doing the basic edits. I only have an email trail with Vint Cerf about the initial dates. Google has now, mid-2018, launched a celebrity version of this, called Google Cameo and this prompted me to revisit it.
The idea was to implement this first as a website and then later as an app, with all videos stored on YouTube. The system just acts as a way to record and post videos with the relevant meta-tags attached and then provide a nice interface (by speaking or typing questions) to search videos stored on YouTube and play them.
Please have a look at a crude presentation of how it might feel:
Asking Questions Answering Questions
You can also see suggestions for the process and questions:
Simple Set-Up Sample Initial Question
© Frode Hegland 2020