The "email" clients of the future are going to be dealing with multi-terabyte caches[1] with lots of high-bitrate audio and 5K+ video and images. A robust and competitive email client should be able to do real-time summarization, translation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and index into media files (I should be able to query for a phrase and get the relevant portion of a video or audio clip in the search results).
We have all of the algorithms now, so the hardest part is probably developing a good UI. So, you need to a super fast computer so that:
(1) You can power the UI
(2) You can rapidly iterate in response to user testing.
[1] By "cache" I mean stuff that is stored locally rather than in the cloud; I'm not talking about CPU caches which will probably stay about the same.
Can you point to active research in the area of interactive applications with local or multi-tier caching? Everything in the news is about "cloud". The closest I've seen to cache-oriented apps were the cloudlets at CMU, http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu.
> We have all of the algorithms now
Aren't some of those algorithms patented, e.g. speech recognition from SRI, Nuance, Apple/MS/Google, IBM, AT&T and increasingly implemented in centralized cloud storage rather than at the edge? How about lack of access to training data?
I think the point here is that we don't see this kind of research because nobody invest in these super fast and expensive workstations that could mimic the future hardware.
I don't think speech recognition algorithms are patented. At least not the Google ones, since AFAIK they use neural networks. You could train your algorithm centrally and then ship all the neurons, weights and biases of to the individual device and keep the training data secret.
We have all of the algorithms now, so the hardest part is probably developing a good UI. So, you need to a super fast computer so that:
(1) You can power the UI
(2) You can rapidly iterate in response to user testing.
[1] By "cache" I mean stuff that is stored locally rather than in the cloud; I'm not talking about CPU caches which will probably stay about the same.