Notifications that wait for conversational gaps

 May 30th, 2010
ideas, tech
In science fiction televison (trek, etc) notification beeps always seem to wait until they won't be interrupting things. While occasionally someone will be paged while talking, it's always for the dramatic effect of cutting them off in the middle of an idea. This has always seemed neat but basically impossible to me. Except that it may not be. What if the communication divice always was listening, and could delay notification by, say, three seconds waiting for a gap in conversation?

(The amount of gap time could even be variable: the interrupter sets a gap time, then as long as it's not less than the minimum allowable gap time the interruptee has set on their device, the longer gap is used. This would allow people to be more polite in non-urgent situations.)

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