A Wearable PC That Helps You Remember

July 26 -- How often do you find yourself asking the person you met last week this question: "What's your name again?"

With the development of a wearable communication device, which uses the latest capabilities of speech recognition, you may one day get help in remembering those names.

The prototype, called a Personal Awareness Assistant, was developed by researchers from Accenture Technology Labs, a New York-based management and technology services organization.

Consisting of a wearable computer, the prototype does not have a monitor or keyboard. But it does have an audio buffer, and two wireless microphones — one worn in the user's ear, and one worn around the waist. The recorded audio is stored in the computer's address book and is stamped with date, time, and location, using a Global Positioning System.

What Accenture officials are looking for is a company to buy the idea and build it for a commercial market.

‘Who Did I Meet Last Week?’

Developers say it will help people remember the most important content in their conversations.

The system is meant to be always on. It buffers the last 60 seconds of audio, and when it receives a spoken prompt from the user, it saves a portion of that audio to memory.

For example, a commonly used phrase the prototype can be programmed to recognize is "nice to meet you." After recognizing the words, the system saves the recorded audio of the 10 seconds before the phrase and the 5 seconds after, so that the name of the person you meet and any other important bits of the conversation are stored in the system's memory.

"We can be in the middle of a conversation and there can be something that I want to remember later. Now I have that gratification later on," said Dana Le, a research associate at Accenture, and the product's lead developer.

If the user wants to retrieve the saved audio segment , he or she can simply ask, "Who did I meet last week?" The system then locates and plays the saved audio clip.