In an earlier post I presented 4 gift ideas for the geek in your life. I picked them not just because they’re cool, but also because they each represent an example of innovation at its finest. I’ll take a post for each to explain why.
On my list is the series of smart pens by Livescribe. I’ve been working with the first-gen Pulse pen for over a year now. It has utterly transformed the way I take notes and transcribe interviews. Its genius is in the way it records ambient sounds and then indexes them with any notes you take on special paper.
Other smart pens have attempted similar functions, but this is the killer app because the special paper is cheap, requires no special setup or fussing with, and the system works flawlessly. I use it mostly for taking notes during interviews (later I just tap interesting quotes in my notes for instant playback on the pen). But you can also use it to create “pencasts,” little movies that show notes and drawings forming in time with recorded narration. You can see one in action as part of my Popular Mechanics feature on SpaceX.
I had a chance to talk with Livescribe CEO and inventor Jim Marggraff about his vision for this technology. He also did the earlier LeapFrog toys (my kids use the LeapFrog Tag pen to have books read to them), and Livescribe is part of a continuum building toward a broader vision. Essentially, Marggraff is engaged in nothing less than the creation of an entirely new communications medium. “Paper-based multimedia” is the term Marggraff used in describing this new medium early on to his business partners.
How does it differ from the media we’re more familiar with? “As a culture we’re accustomed to active visual media, not passive visual,” Marggraff told me. “Things happen when you put something in front of somebody—a still—as in a book or a page. It’s very different. It turns out if you’re looking at something static and you touch it or click on it and audio begins to play, you will remain engaged with that static image for about seven seconds. If the audio just begins talking and it doesn’t reground your eyes in that image, you disconnect. So I had to really guide people on how to script audio for static art.” The trick is to continually redirect users to look at elements on the page being described in the audio, or direct them to click different parts of the images or text.
Marggraff and Livescribe’s mission is to “capture, access, and share information.” Ultimately Marggraff hopes to create the technologies to enable us to digitally record all of our experiences, not just isolated conversations, for instant retrieval and sharing at any time. For now, Livescribe is looking ahead to iPhone and iPad access to pencasts, automatic transcription and other services, virtual notebooks on your computer desktop, and more. “The beauty is there’s demand for all of these,” Marggraff told me, “and the interest and the growth in sales for the pen are quite explosive.” As a user, I can understand why.
With Marggraff’s vision and Livescribe’s sharp mission focus, I think it’s quite possible that these pens will soon become as indispensable as our phones and laptops.
The CEO of Livescribe has brought his Leapfrog sensibilities and experience to the business: The product is designed for use by children under 10, the software is the most buggy (V2.3.4.47845) I’ve ever seen, and fundamental features (e.g., the ability to delete that doodle page you drew when you were learning, because the documentation is so pathetic) are not even designed in. You can’t even export to most common formats; you can only use their proprietary formats they deign to include. You must buy other services to even make the product usable (e.g., their proprietary, over-priced tablets, MyScript, etc.)
If you’re willing to waste more of your time trying to use this than it takes to scan a written page into Omnipage and get a Word document go try the product. My time is worth more than that.
Carol Anne, I think you may be missing the main usage of the product. Yes, you can export to other formats (Word, PDF, Flash, etc.), but to me the main utility is to create handwritten indices (on the fly, no less) of audio in progress. As a journalist I find this invaluable for conducting interviews. Someone says something interesting, and all I have to do is make a note in my notebook (“interesting quote”). Later, when I am composing my article, I can simply tap the place in my notes where it says “interesting quote” and get instant replay of that quote. In the old days, I had to rewind and fast forward through tapes, trusting my memory to find interesting quotes. Later I learned to keep track of counter numbers in my notebook so that I could rewind or fast forward to the right counter number. But this was cumbersome, and required me to keep my nose down in my notebook rather than engaging fully with my interview subject. The Livescribe pens represent a great improvement.
Dear Michael: I respectfully disagree.
You use it in Journalism. The product seems to be great at that, and for students taking notes in the classroom. I concur in your observation of the principle benefit of synchronized notes and audio.
But, a well-designed product that isn’t explicitly marketed to a subset of the general market needs to take other options into account. A good product will find unexpected uses. (Remember when PCs were intended to be a platform for MS Office? Then came the Internet…which MS was late to get serious about. Similar issue.)
What I WANT to use LiveScribe for is to take notes and minutes of meetings, convert them (myScript) into text, and use the audio to–like you–clarify a written note by rehearing the text. If I could do that will all my company’s meetings, we could avoid the “redeciding” that wastes productive time.
Right now, someone in each meeting keeps a Journal of issues raises, issues resolved, and tasks assigned, and we publish that. I had hoped LiveScribe would make that easier. But, frankly, dealing with all the steps LiveScribe requires, and the limitations imposed on exporting options, it’s still cheaper for us to have a secretary scan the journal and retype the text than use LiveScribe. (Yes, we’ve tested it.)
The bugs (like the inability for the Desktop to remember it’s size and position, like every other Windows application, and the crashes that cause us to have to close the program and re-open it) are also troubling.
–Carol Anne
Interesting. Yes, I can see how the pens would be frustrating to use the context you describe, Carol Anne. I don’t believe the pens can link audio to text that has been converted from handwriting to printed text.
When I was researching my book The Department of Mad Scientists, I got a preview of a system in development at SRI International that is designed for doing exactly what you’re talking about—recording and transcribing notes at a meeting, with each person present identified according to his/her comments. The system would take this a step further by attempting to tease out action points and then emailing this summary to each participant along with the transcript.
I’m not sure this is a great solution either, as each participant would have to wear a microphone so that the system could correctly hear and ID them. Also, I wasn’t able to demo the actual system myself, so I don’t know how effective it is at interpreting spoken language and identifying the main points.
SRI spun a subset of this technology out as separate company called Siri, which was promptly snapped up by Apple. You can now download the Siri app for use on an iPhone. You speak queries to it, it interprets what you say, and uses that to perform web searches for you. It works surprisingly well. For instance, you can ask it “What movies are playing in my area,” and it will use the phone’s onboard GPS to find your location and then look up local movie theaters and return the next showtimes. I imagine that Apple will more fully incorporate this tech with future versions of its OS.