Membranophonist’s Ramblings

I’d like to see Apple combine natural language parsing, speech recognition, and Smart Group building. By doing so, users could simply tell an application what they want to see, rather than messing around with menus and text fields. The Smart Group creation interface should mold itself to the user, not the other way around.

Think of the process of choosing criteria to create a Smart Playlist in iTunes - it is essentially a sentence:

“Show me the Wayne Shorter compositions from the 60’s.”

• “Wayne Shorter compositions” - iTunes knows to look for songs with Wayne Shorter in the Composer tag
• “from the 60’s” - from among the Wayne Shorter songs, iTunes finds those with 1960-1969 in the Year tag

This combination of technologies could work in iPhoto, but probably not as well because of the limited structuring of the meta-data.