I don’t let Clover use my computer for very long, because for some reason e always pushes key combos that do odd things, even from the lock screen. I tried to keep em in a game of Osmos on the tablet, but that doesn’t last every long either, since the soft keys are on the bottom of the screen.
It occurred to me to create a separate account for Clover on the tablet, since that is a feature in Android now. That way e could play around, but without a connected account, and all the network snooping turned off. Clover was delighted! Here are some observations.
First of all, I am amazed by how much detail e picks up from watching us. The new home screen screen didn’t have anything on it, but the bottom row had a bunch of Google apps and the icon to open the app drawer. Clover kept pushing that, and launched apps from that screen. Whenever e made it back to the home, that would be the button e pressed again. This happened about 1 minute into have eir own account.
The second thing, and the inspiration for the title of this post, is when Clover activated the speech feature. It made a sound, which Clover took to be it was talking to em. So e held the tablet up to eir head like a phone, and talked said, “Hello.” It replied with three beeps. Clover proceeded to just talk to it.
That is pretty interesting. I don’t use the speech features in any device, because I am trained to use my hands instead of my voice when I am thinking and computing at the same time. There are already people who use voice technology extensively; of the folks I know who do, none of them use it for lack of access, they just were into it, and adjusted their workflow so. I get the appeal, but my standards are Star Trek high, which means I never picked it up.
Clover, however, will have this little piece of tech that I take for granted, in nearly every device e interacts with. It is only going to get better, and development will speed up as more people use it. Clover will have used it for practically eir whole life. That is fascinating. 