Works in Progress
Here are some areas currently in the design and development stage:
- Stock price section.
Currently the mobile client can provide daily stock reports on a small, manually-coded portfolio. This effort will enhance that ability by allowing individual users to define a portfolio of their own stocks for the daily report or on-demand inquiry ("How did Apple do today"). In addition, an option to provide more portfolio information (purchase price, number of stocks) will allow a "how did I do today" functionality to give a personalized detailed report on how the stock market treated you on any given day. The portfolio information will be modified throuh the web client but tied to the mobile client for audio reports.
- Stock report out.
Currently the mobile client reports on specific stocks with slight verbal enhancement: if a stock changed less than 1%, the audio will simply say the stock is up or do (possible variants: up slights, down a bit, up but not by much). Further refinement to make the audio / TTS ore natural sounding is underway using the DCRE VS/MT text engine.
- Personalized podcast playing
Expanding on the current set of news sources, this option will allow individual users to enter their preferred podcasts (news, word of the day, knitting, kitten juggling, etc.) and have the latest episode be available in demand. This is not to replace podcast feeders or players so much as to bring additional audio content into the verbal command and control of the mobile client. Targetted use case: Driving and wanting to hear the news or the latest podcast, goal is to become a simple verbal command "Play the BBC"
- On-device application launching. (Updated)
Mostly, the project lead on this is wanting to "Launch Spotify" which is underway, sorta. New code on the server side (Amadeus) now supports a launch directive which can be interpreted on the client (Brainjogger) and launch the application locally. Test efforts are available if you have Pandora or Sonos. Long term direction is to allow user-customizable launch commands but it may require a working knowledge of the application's manifest, which is hokey at best.
- Complete re-write of the client
Yes, sadly, we have outgrown the initial development environment for the mobile client and need to take what we've built and use it as a template for a ground up re-write. We're tapped out on Android developers at the moment, so we're trying to recruit some old Python and Perl coders to the task but they are understandably cranky about the whole thing. These are the challnges you face when you have no funding. (DCRE Labs, we're not complaining, your servers and web space are awesome!)