I love the little bits of technology that help us through our day and save hours of our time over the months and weeks that pass. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is definitely one of those things and it’s popping up in more and more applications. The only thing I hope for other than greater prevalence in all devices and applications, is that they become more documented, or that some UI pattern emerges that allows us to know when we, as users, can expect that helping hand.
The biggest and most well known is of course Google even if it isn’t full on NLP but rather predefined operators which approach natural language; 200 Euros in USD, or define:supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for example. They are also moving towards more semantically relevant results with Google Squared which will only improve in quality as more publishers add sematic data, microformats, RDFa, or whatever you like. Regardless, what they have accomplished through a single text field is astounding, and here are a couple of cheat sheets to help you along, in simple and advanced versions.
What I am focusing on are desktop applications that I interact with countless times per day let alone per month or year. A perfect example would be OmniFocus. I have used OmniFocus since it first went beta and used natural language as well as operators to set due dates (next fri, next month, +3d, +1w, et al) for most of that time. Not having to click through a date picker for any task with a start and/or due date is a massive time saver.
Apple’s Mail, on desktop only unfortunately, looks for date strings in emails and offers up a menu option on hover to create iCal events. So, January 21st 2011 would give us that menu and I expect it to handle that. Mail also not only creates the new event but creates a link back to the original email in the iCal event itself. Put together they are another huge time saver. What took me aback today was the fact that I hovered over the words “next friday” hoping to get the iCal drop down and I actually did. Considering I have tried it in the past and it didn’t behave that way, I wasn’t expecting it all. Great stuff indeed.
Now Apple and other manufacturers and software developers need to bring this to the other devices in our lives, namely my iPhone and iPad, and into the Android ecosystem as well.
Here’s to hoping that this kind of cross-application integration will be available in all applications and all devices soon.
