- Dawn of Communicative Computing
| Often dialogue is likened to a journey or trip: "No, we should not go down that path", "The discussion took a wrong turn", "We should start with the introduction and see how far we can get", etc. Let us take the metaphor further: If we compare dialogue to a trip, what kinds of controls would a "dialogue car" have? Certainly it will differ quite a bit from the controls in modern cars--but how exactly?
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| You are in the future and are required to drive a brand-new kind of vehicle. There is only one slight problem: You have never seen those dialogue-based cars, or Diamobiles, before; there are no lessons given to operate them, and there is no manual available. Yet, when you enter the Diamobile you realize you already know how to operate it: in fact, you have been training all your life to use it, since it is based on principles identical to the ones you use for interacting with people.
You look around and you see a number of buttons. Yes, there are many buttons, but you know exactly which ones to press--just punch a few and off you go. Some of the functions you really like are the buttons that allow you to interrupt an ongoing trip and erase it--instantaneously the trip doesn’t seem like a real event anymore but rather a faint memory of something you'll soon forget. There are other buttons in the car: some are for taking back a turn that you just made, or backing up arbitrarily far along the road to take a different turn. Some are labeled "Back to where you started", others are more involved, like "combine elements from various trips to make a new trip", and "make a realistic trip to places that never existed". One of the Diamobile’s extraordinary functions is its ability to freeze a given trip and instantly go somewhere else--then, whenever you feel like continuing, zipping back with you to where you left off. Most of the time you know exactly where the Diamobile is going, and when you don't you can simply ask it. No need to read maps or look up addresses (except perhaps once in a while). Not only does the Diamobile help get you places, it's navigational skills often outperform your own. When you’re not quite sure which buttons to press your gesture and gaze actually help the Diamobile in guiding you to your destination. You can choose your level of engagement in the trip being made: specify just the trip to the next streetlight or a full run through a series of cities. But most of the time, once you have programmed it with your destination, you can just sit back and relax or engage in any activity of choice. |
| Yes, the dialogue car would be a marvel of any era. It reminds us of how powerful language is for getting things done. But what has this to do with digital technology? Well, it has to do with how we interact with computers: Imagine that the Diamobile is not a car but a computational entity, like a small computer on your wrist; the "trips" you take are tasks to be done in a virtual city, a city that you -- and many others -- built to store files, phone numbers, spreadsheets, favorite http sites and gif images. Truth is, a Diamobile can be used for things other than navigating geography; one can take trips to infoscapes and data lands, even use it to make Math Mountains and Music Soup. And this is not because the Diamobile is so big, has such a powerful engine, or is so aerodynamically contoured. No, it is simply because the Diamobile has a general-purpose interface called face-to-face dialogue, an interaction technique whose validity many have doubted as a way for interacting with machines. Yet they themselves use it every day to accomplish things very complex indeed. When can you get a computational Diamobile? Perhaps sooner than you think.
©1996 K. R. Thórisson
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