Last Friday, I went to a GREAT seminar hosted by Stanford Human-Computer Interactive Group (HCI). The presenter Mira Doutcheva is a senior research scientist at Adobe Systems. Her work in Adobe (and also this seminar) is focused on: 1) how to lower the users' barriers with the help of creativity support tools and 2) how to help designers and developers to build these tools to support the information need. Check more detailed information here.
The tool called "Pixeltone" makes me extremely interested. Check its introduction video here and see how cool it is!
Of course it makes those complicated steps to accomplish a task become much easier with help of audio instruction. Assuming you are an experienced photoshop user, you have to go through AT LEAST four steps ("edit-color-red-apply") to change the color of a shirt. But with Pixeltone, it only takes two ("define a shirt"-"change it red"), even for a beginner. But I see its great potential to get over the "natural language" problem, which is a big challenge for most of the designers. You cannot expect your users to know what "rinse" is for the first time, and it may take them so long to figure out what does that mean. (Unfortunately, "rinse" is not the only "Designer's Language" they need to figure out).
So the mechanism of PixelTone is that it analyzes the users' data by breaking the syntax of the sentence. For example: "Make the shirt bright" will be "Verb+n.+adj." in the database. The computer will search the database and find the correct action next. That means you don't have to find the ONLY correct path ("edit-color-red-apply"). Just leave the work to your computer. But remember: Be nice! Don't expect your laptop know what you mean by "make it heavenly" :)
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