Is Persieve Just Another Evernote? Work
1 August 08
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IBM has been working on a “memory assistance tool” called Persieve. The concept is pretty cool: take pictures, record voice notes, and add text notes with your mobile phone, then upload them to a server which then allows you to search within images, voice notes, and text notes to help you remember things.
An example of usage cited on the IBM site was that you could take a pic of a face and a business card to help you remember that the two are connected. It almost makes sense (except for the whole problem of putting the data back together: I mean, I can see how it can help associate a name with a face, but not the other way around. Usually, you are confronted with a familiar face and can’t remember the name. I imagine a situation where instead of a smooth greeting where you simply avoid using a name, you frantically search your blackberry to try to visually match a stored photo.
Honestly, this seems quite a bit like evernote, which can handle images, audio notes, and text notes, and is searchable within them and, of course, can receive notes via email, which means mobile phones. Lifehacker just ran a Hive Five on data collection tools, which included OneNote as well as legal pads. So why is this new or interesting?
It hit the front page of slashdot last night, after a computerworld article about it. So far, slashdotters haven’t made the connection that this software exists (in Evernote’s beta that I strongly recommend trying out, and in MS Office’s OneNote which is pretty good as well).
In practice, this is a really important step in computing: creating a general searchable external memory for humans to carry around with them. A real achievement in this problem domain could be a software cloud that actively searches your environment in order to remember links between things and to match patterns before you need them. So your mobile phone constantly caps your environment, and if you force it to focus on a face, it attempts to identify its owner, or if you ask it where you saw some lost item earlier, it may remember for you. That design is many steps from approaching achievement, but until they speak about these projects in those terms, the vision isn’t big enough. Just use Evernote, it works.
