Topic: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone
Chumby will make the perfect whole-house intercom replacement.
My parents have a big beautiful house overlooking a big lake in Arkansas. The house was built about ten years ago, but still has an ancient hard-wired intercom system that works very poorly. My dad has been asking me for ideas on how to fix/replace it.
Chumby looks ideal for this purpose. About 5 or 6 chumbys placed around the house and set up to work as intercom system in addition to playing music and serving up all kinds of useful widgets. They already have wifi all over the house. Looks like a perfect solution.
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The other reason is for voice recognition. With no IR input, this becomes even more important. Sure, you can set the Chumby up to cycle through some different widgets, but when you want to see your stock price, you want to see it now! Humans have grown used to instant gratification lately. If I want to see what those turkeys at Broadcom have done to my Qualcomm stock price today I don't want to have to wait for it to cycle around. I would much prefer to have a chumby that just sits on a Time/Temp widget all the time, and then temporarily switches to something else when I yell at it. "Calendar"......."Stocks"......"Slashdot" That's how I would like to interact with my Chumby. It's not "Manly" to squeeze it three times to get a stock quote.
jp