Mrs Fridge says Hello World

Last Thursday we were travelling back from British Telecoms R&D labs, and the conversation turned naturally (as it does) to the rise of Machine to Machine (m2m) comms and its impact in the Digital Home - both subjects that we have done client work and given talks on in the past.

Anyway,we hypothesized about the rise of the Digital Butler and other functions in the Digital Home workflow including the Digital Housekeeper - computer based housekeeper that took over a lot of the admin tasks in running a busy home, those myriad of little details that slip between cracks, especially in busy houses infested with children, animals and other chaos inducing agents.

However, as we are shortly to do a presentation on these things, but to non techies, we were wondering how to make this more tangible - And so was born Mrs Fridge the housekeeper. They also say a picture tells a thousand words, and here it is:



Mrs Fridge is an AI, but you can easily interact with her avatar on Facebot, the universal SocBotNet that makes it easy to set up, network and manage your bots. You can keep up to date and communicate with Mrs Fridge on your iPhone while travelling, and keep up with the rest of the household gossip (Mr Roomba is stuck under the hall umbrella stand again). But to communicate with each other however, a short form system that has proved more useful is Critter, a microbotblog service that allows unified comm ingress and egress (seen here as a feed on Facebot) which also allows you to see the ongoing conversations with Jeeves the e-Butler, the Ocado grocery delivery system and that persistent Mr ExpressBooker who keeps on trying to sell rail tickets because Mrs Fridge once did the family holiday booking when Jeeves came over poorly with a virus....

And just so you know this is coming - I noticed today that Cisco and Whirlpool are getting together to:

...develop a complete line of networked home solutions stocked with Internet-ready products and services, which are now only prototypes. Cisco launched its Internet home platform at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

Mrs Fridge looks like she's getting an upgrade.....

A wireless and removable Web tablet resides in the refrigerator door. You can use it as a calendar, or to check e-mail, order groceries, or leave notes for other household members. Kiss those magnets and cluttered sticky notes goodbye.

.....at the Consumer Electronics Show. We expect Mrs Fridge will be paying a virtual visit next year when they get the robofeeds sorted out. (We've looked at these tablet services, a fridge door is too small annd the i/o is lousy in our view - its more likely to be a small noteboard sized wall mounted device like todays photodisplays, or just displayed on the kitchen PC)

In all seriousness though, this whole area is non trivial - just working through the udse cases of Mrs Fridge shows the huge gaps in technology today, and what has to be solved to let a system like this work. Take the use case of knowing what food is in the house - the interplay between labelling, sensors, stock control, semantic systems, complex transactions etc is quite considerable. Its for this reason that home automation has tended to start in high value (entertainment) or high importance (health and security) systems.

I'd better go now and set Mr Roomba free......