When you're traveling on an exciting new adventure, sitting down to write about everything that happened each day may be the last thing you feel like doing. Microsoft appears to be taking aim at this hurdle with an AI-powered system for automatically creating travel diary entries for you, per a patent spotted by Neowin.
Based on details in the patent, the proposed system would be able to use details from your devices, digital assistant, GPS data, media and more to identify when you've taken a trip. It would then process that information and generate a travel diary entry with details on where you went and what you did, complete with paired imagery and maps.
The system would then present you with a completed entry, and you'd have an opportunity to edit it. Your edits would be taken into account for future diary entries, as the system learns your preferences and style.
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This new system would be something like a souped-up version of Google Maps' monthly recap of places you've been. As nifty as that sounds, there's no guarantee Microsoft will deliver, or even be able to.
If you've ever seen the kind of text AI generates, such as predictive text-generated Harry Potter fan fiction, you know it can be on the wrong side of sensible.
Microsoft surely has more power behind it's artificial intelligence. So, perhaps it can manage to generate this type of content with accurate, logical text. But, there will remain the question of whether the company will actually bother to do so.
If we've learned anything from the likes of Google's Project Ara, it's that even an awesome patent doesn't mean a product is coming. While this could be tech that changes the way we travel, Microsoft could easily never build a product around this patent.
Though there may be an audience for automatically generated travel diaries, many adventurers may prefer to put their experiences in their own words, with their own interpretation of events and emotional reactions that AI can't guess at.
And, even among the audience of people who don't want to write their own travel diaries, there will surely be some skeptics when it comes to allowing AI even more access to their information.
Those potential hurdles could keep Microsoft from releasing an actual product.
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