A personal stream, with voice as the main interface
I've been thinking for a while about what I call a personal stream, and now I finally have a chance to try it.
The idea is this. There's an endless feed, like on social media. That's the visual version. And there's a second version: you put in an earbud, and it's like radio. Smart radio that just reads the feed out to you. At any point you can say stop, I don't get this part, let's look at it. And just like in a feed, you can comment on any item: I disagree with this, this one isn't quite clear to me.
I think voice is the most promising interface. You can do something else while it plays, walk somewhere, give your eyes a rest, and it just gets read out to you. And the stream itself can hold anything. Answers to your questions (you ask something, and the next items immediately rearrange around it). Passages from books and articles on the topic: someone already wrote about this, listen to a chapter. You could also add a screen with schematics and diagrams.
One thing that really grabs me is reading formulas out loud. Right now I'm trying to listen to a math book through an automatic text-to-speech thing, and it reads the formulas as a string of letters, totally impossible to follow. If my agent read them instead, it could say them properly, like a lecturer. Not letters one after another, but "B to the fourth power, times something."
It's hard to take in by ear, but it's a way of taking things in that's worth building up in yourself.