William Dorn
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

An Audio Product I Would Kill For in 2018

Photo Credit to Flickr user Casey Fiesler

Like most hard working humans, I’ve been thinking about ways to make a little more money. While brainstorming ideas for a business I could enjoy creating, I came up with an idea for a couple tech products I thought might be of use to some people.

Idea #1: AutoPause

Imagine a system that could save you thousands of hours of wasted time by pausing your audio application the moment you get distracted by something else and stop listening. I don’t know about you, but I’ve attempted to multi task my way through many podcasts or audio books and missed big chunks of valuable information that I had to later go back and try to find. Other times I would waste a bunch of time going through a missed portion of podcast only to find that it was not filled with valuable information. You can save a lot of time by catching the content the first time around!

You might be listening to an audio book when a family member walks in and starts talking to you. Any number of distractions could happen that take your focus off the content you’re listening to and cause you to miss an important detail or two.

I know nothing about A.I. and brain scanning technology, but I did do a little bit of google research and found that portable brain scanning headbands are already available for consumer use. One company I found, Muse, sells these headbands and are actively looking for developers to create relevant applications for people to benefit from in the real world. So far the main focus seems to be on brain training and stress reduction types of things, but I don’t see why the tech wouldn’t be able to sense when your attention gets pulled away from something that you were intently listening to.

Idea #2: AutoHighlight

My other idea was kind of the same thing, but for E-readers and tablets. How many times have you been reading written content and started daydreaming about something completely unrelated while your eyes kept scanning through the sentences. You get to the end of the page and realize that you haven’t absorbed a single thought from the book.

Well if you were reading that book on a tablet, with the above stated brain scanning technology mixed with a dash of eye tracking, it may be possible to sense the moment the reader gets distracted, and start highlighting the words wherever the eye tracking senses they are on the page. While you read, the book starts highlighting itself when you aren’t focused anymore. You would see the highlighted words and it would snap your attention back to the content. No longer would you make it 5 paragraphs down the road before you realize what’s happening.

That’s it. Those were 2 of my ideas for products that I wish I had. I’ve always been a dreamer with an overactive imagination and plenty of ideas, but I don’t know how to go about bringing them to life myself. I’m hoping someone more versed in these things than myself will happen across this and bring it into reality, and if it happens, I will be the first to buy.

Something like this could give us greater control over our own attention, and prevent us from fumbling the only real limited resource we have; Time.

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