Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Home Manager | ||
| A device that responds to verbal or other commands; serves as an intelligent telephone answering machine and other tasks. |
There is a short mention of this in Queen of Angels. The unit functions in an apartment that clearly belongs to an upper caste person; it is probably an expensive item. Besides working as an answering machine, it has speech recognition and schedule keeping functionality.
| At Mary's whistle the home manager read her messages. Its masculine voice followed her through three rooms as she searched for a lost curl of mineral silver to wrap around her ear. "There's a call from Junior Lieutenant Theodora Ferrero, no message," the manager concluded. |
| From Queen of Angels,
by Greg Bear. Published by Warner Books in 1990 Additional resources -
|
There is a continuing fascination for devices like this in sf; another favorite example is the Daily Schedule (DS) in The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Queen of Angels
More Ideas
and Technology by Greg Bear
Tech news articles related to Queen of Angels
Tech news articles related to works by Greg Bear
| Dadbot Digital Immortality |
| Should We Permit Computers To Create Their Own Language? |
| DeepMind AI Baffled By Homer Simpson, Needs Human Help |
| Deep Learning Creates New Faces |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
Ever wonder how you look when you enter a new part of a spacecraft?
'Whoever launched it fired a laser cannon...'
'Most of the crew have the tiny imp ride on their shoulder...'
'About a third of the people in Manhattan have replaced their Freedom Card with a radio-frequency chip...'
