Intuitive computing methods and systems

Abstract

A smart phone senses audio, imagery, and / or other stimulus from a user's environment, and acts autonomously to fulfill inferred or anticipated user desires. In one aspect, the detailed technology concerns phone-based cognition of a scene viewed by the phone's camera. The image processing tasks applied to the scene can be selected from among various alternatives by reference to resource costs, resource constraints, other stimulus information (e.g., audio), task substitutability, etc. The phone can apply more or less resources to an image processing task depending on how successfully the task is proceeding, or based on the user's apparent interest in the task. In some arrangements, data may be referred to the cloud for analysis, or for gleaning. Cognition, and identification of appropriate device response(s), can be aided by collateral information, such as context. A great number of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

Description

RELATED APPLICATION DATA[0001]This application is a division of application Ser. No. 14 / 242,417, filed Apr. 1, 2014, which is a division of application Ser. No. 12 / 797,503, filed Jun. 9, 2010 (published as 20110161076), which claims priority to provisional applications 61 / 318,217, filed Mar. 26, 2010, 61 / 315,475, filed Mar. 19, 2010, and 61 / 291,812, filed Dec. 31, 2009. This application is also a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 13 / 708,434, filed Dec. 7, 2012 (published as 20130128060), which is a division of application Ser. No. 13 / 401,332, filed Feb. 21, 2012 (now U.S. Pat. No. 8,422,994), which is a division of application Ser. No. 12 / 712,176, filed Feb. 24, 2010 (now U.S. Pat. No. 8,121,618), which is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 12 / 640,386, filed Dec. 17, 2009 (now U.S. Pat. No. 8,175,617), which claims priority to provisional applications 61 / 255,817, filed Oct. 28, 2009; 61 / 261,028, filed Nov. 13, 2009; 61 / 263,318, filed Nov. 20, 2009; 61 / 264,639,...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

There are many challenges to realizing such a device.

Perhaps the greatest of these is the first, which is essentially the long-standing problem of machine cognition.

Such solutions, however, are not practical—neither in terms of time or resources.

When other solutions prove unavailing, this is a possible alternative, although the time delay is excessive in many circumstances.

Nor is there an unbounded universe of possible actions that are appropriate in response to such sights and sounds.

Sometimes the planning exercise may not find a suitable solution, or may find its cost to be prohibitive.

The phone, of course, has a variety of limited resources, e.g., CPU, battery, wireless bandwidth, dollar budget, etc.

Images