The power of conversations

When we think of personal assistants today, we think of call centers and home automation – “Hey Alexa – turn on the lights”, “I see that your phone number is 202-555-1212 – please press or say ‘1’ if you are calling from the number on your account”. This is not a conversation, this is a set of discrete commands that you could replicate with a button or a web service.

More advanced call centers may have a level of AI which will ask “Please describe your issue so ‘I’ can route your call to the appropriate team”. In this case the system looks for patterns or keywords – kinda like a web based search engine to increase the likelihood that they can route you to the right team. We are inching closer to a time where these systems will get the routing right every time.

But what if you could have an actual dialog? The system needs to not only understand the domain that you in, “trouble shooting your home router” or “booking a vacation in the middle of a series of business trips”. The current domain specific machine learning can get us closer to conversations, but they have issues when the conversation drifts outside of the domain of knowledge that it is trained in. These domains are the context where the assistant is relevant.

Having a conversation without context is just a simple set of stateless commands. The Internet was built on this technology, but as businesses have extended the capabilities of the Internet, we’ve had to maintain state. State allows for context, and this is were conversations must head to realize the power of assistants.

State also allows for domain shifts. If I understand that we are talking about a piece of manufacturing equipment, and suddenly you ask me about the technical skills of an employee, I need to keep track of the domain of prior parts of the conversation and shift to the new domain of employee skills. Understanding this shift, potentially even running separate conversational threads in parallel to see the relevance of each thread to the current part of the conversation, may allow us to increase seamlessness of the conversational shifts.

Seamlessly crossing domains across a conversation will allow businesses to take advantage of voice, and help us realize higher value of this new interface.

UX of the Future

I’ve been talking about the idea of how our computer experiences will be changing for years over at my podcast – Game At Work dot Biz. Much of the time I’ve talked about this in fits ands starts, and as such I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job of explaining my thoughts in detail. My goal of this blog post is to start the thought process of explaining why I believe we are in the middle of a major change to how we will be using computers in business over the next few years.

I believe that for most computer interaction we will be using a combination of Voice and Augmented Reality. It’s that simple. The key things that are driving this are incredible advances in AI on the edge, massive improvements in AR development tools, and the mass acceptance of tools like Alexa, OK Google, and Siri.

I am not talking about the simple usage we have today – “Alexa – Play Coldplay”, “OK Google – Turn on my Lights”, and “Hey Siri – Remind me to do something when I get home”. I am thinking of Industrial use cases, where a worker is elbow deep in a piece of heavy equipment and needs to look up something in an equipment manual. Instead of looking at a printed manual, or even a PDF on a tablet, the worker will say – “How do I adjust this valve?” And a 3D overlay will display directly on the piece of equipment and “show” the worker how to perform the task. In meetings, a always on listening service will capture meeting minutes, action items, and schedule follow-up meetings. And while driving down the highway, a “head-up” display will provide meaningful and contextual information about traffic routing and weather, tied to your appointment schedule.

I am not “yet” suggesting that we will get rid of programming and heavy data entry tasks with voice input, but we will revise our interactions with computers, to understand context and continuity so that voice will be like talking to your own personal assistant, and our environment will be reactive to what you are interacting with. My goal over the next few posts will be to explain how this will happen. Stay tuned.

Industrial Internet Consortium – First time attendee(s)

This week, I was glad to see my old friend and former fellow 8Bar teammate Ian Hughes, for drinks while he was in town. I found out he was attending the Quarterly meeting of the Industrial Internet Consortium in Raleigh, NC. Ian is now an analysts at 451 Research and focuses on AR/VR and the Internet of Things. IBM’s Watson IoT unit, where I work as a Strategist, is also a member. I hadn’t realized that the meeting was in town, and found out from Ian that no IBMers were at the meeting. So Tuesday morning I scrambled to make sure I could attend, and that I could participate in appropriate sessions.

The IIC, is an international consortium that is focused on industrial uses for the Internet of Things. As you can image there are tons of working groups, Technicial groups, and breakouts ranging in all kinds of topics. The big news this year is that the IIC and the OpenFog Consortium were merging. As businesses look at benefiting from instrumenting their assets and processes, AI is happening at all levels of the architecture, Edge, Fog, Local Data Centers, Cloud and Enterprise Data Centers. This means that figuring out the right architecture for any specific use case requires understand requirements, processes, and technical standards. By bringing together these two communities I am sure we will have a better understanding of how businesses should implement specific use cases.

As a first time attendee, I spent much of my time listening and reading. I did get to meet interesting technical and business leaders from many companies. And look forward to seeing what my next steps may be, as a member of the IIC.

Security and IoT

This year there have been so many reports about IoT devices being hacked, being misused, and being subverted. I think we are at a watershed when it comes to Internet of Things Connected devices. There are two major issues, which if not resolved, will crater the industry and drive a large spike of distrust into the industry.

First, most device manufacturers are not in the business to support their devices for the long term. We’ve gotten to a point in society were we have been trained to replace our technology every few years. PC’s are designed to last three years at most, phones are replaced every two years, and many software products are moving to subscription models, as consumers expect a never ending supply of updates and features, which standard upgrade pricing does not support.

Building a product, and the team you need to support it long term, requires planning and long term revenue streams. If we look at these trends, the desire to design hardware devices with long term security in mind, requires a fundamental shift in how those devices are conceived and charged for. The shift to subscription programs for some hardware is a great example of this change. Apple is doing this with their iPhones and Microsoft is doing this with their Surface laptops. Having cell carriers do this is great for carrier lock in, but doesn’t necessarily translate to the full value for the manufacturer.

Second, we need to have more consequential legislation for data privacy and security. If the only individual that is truly harmed by bad security is the end user or company, then the incentives to get it right by manufacturers is pretty much minimal at best. Many of the basic manufacturers continue to just pump out basic IoT devices, with no long term goal to support them. They make their money on the building and selling new devices. They do not have a long term revenue plan for any specific device, their long term plan is make newer devices.

While this manufacturer centric view of devices makes tons of sense as a manufacturer, the privacy and security concerns are only there in building reputation for manufacturing. While this will have long term brand impacts, many manufactures actually build for multiple other companies, and so they pass that band impact on to the company that white labels their devices. This passing the buck, causes even worse security policies, such as default passwords and open ports. The other bad practice that comes about is for some manufactures, to actually take advantage of the bad security to capture data themselves and exploit this data for additional revenue.

Hopefully in 2019, the value of GDPR will be realized as companies start having to deal with a legislation that takes security and privacy a bit more seriously. I don’t think GDPR is perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.

Why the HELL can’t Apple Fix iTunes?

The number of times that the iTunes library file has corrupted on my iMac is insane! I have a very large iTunes library. It consists of all the CDs, LPs, Cassette Tapes, and even some Reel-to-reels that I own, and have converted to digital. The library is about 23,000 songs and well over a thousand albums. With a library of this size, I have to have it stored on an external NAS, because I also have over a 1,000 TVs episodes and movies too. My NAS is a Drobo5N with 18TB of storage on it.

Here’s the issues that come up periodically in iTunes, and everyone of them drives me totally nuts.

  • First, iTunes has never really done a good job of supporting NAS drives (or really any external drive, as I had these same issues when I had an Drobo directly attached to the iMac).
  • Second, every so often, iTunes loses track of where a song is. This is shown by a small (i) symbol next to the item. If I try to play an album with songs with this symbol it will skip those songs. If I go in and double click on the song title, iTunes magically remembers the location and the song will play.
  • Third, duplicate songs. If you ever go in and tell iTunes to consolidate your library, it will kindly duplicate the songs into it’s own file hierarchy, leaving the original there to. This makes sense from a safety perspective (not deleting the originals, BUT it will then (at times) add the duplicates back in. I think this is a legacy issue when you tell iTunes to monitor a directory.
  • Forth, album art. I have spent a TON of time making sure that all of my album art actually matches the Albums I have. So if I converted an LP to iTunes, I take pictures of the LP so that I can match it up. The number of times that I’ve loaded my library only to see the Gray background with the Musical notes in the picture instead of my nice Album art is beyond count. I have used Doug’s wonderful scripts to actually put the album art into the songs, but since iTunes loses track of some of the songs, it doesn’t always work.
  • And finally, Meta Data. I like to sort my albums in a very specific way. To that end, I have changes sort artist, sort album, etc. but it doesn’t seem to stick there either.

I have been using the iTunes Match service (which I love!) so that I can have my music library on all my devices when I travel, so I would really appreciate it if Apple would spend SOME time and actually fix bugs in iTunes, instead of tweaking the UI.

Traveling with the iPad Pro 11 Inch

I have had the iPad Pro 12.9 inch and it was always great for travel, but I would almost always bring my MacBook Pro with me too. On my current trip I am carrying both my iPad Pro 11 Inch along with my MacBook Pro, but so far, I’ve only used the iPad.

<—- Time Passes —->

I started this blog post over a week ago. I was traveling on vacation when I started it. I am now traveling on business. I’ve been using the iPad Pro both times, and so far I’ve not had any reason to open the MacBook Pro. The one thing that I need to address, and I supported a kickstarter to fix this, is all the various chargers I need when traveling. The iPad Pro uses USB-C, the iPhone uses USB-C to Lightening or USB-B-Lightening, the Apple Watch uses USB-A/B to puck, my Bose noise canceling earWorms (as I call them) use Micro USB. Way too many different connectors.

So far I am okay on this trip, and I discovered that Apple has released a new USB-C to Puck charger for the Apple Watch. So I should be good there soon.

Two days with iPad Pro 11inch

If you follow my blog at all, you know that three years ago I got the original iPad Pro 12.9inch. It really changed how I used my iPad, as I could now really do significant work while on the go. I recently upgraded it to the new iPad Pro 11inch, which seems so small now, but I think I am going to be OK with the new size. I’ve been getting used to the new keyboard, and in two days the number of mistypes have been going down quickly. The new Pencil is amazing. I have used the old pencil to capture notes in customer meetings (much more acceptable compared to typing when your customer talks). The old pencil always seemed to be uncharged (probably because I would forget to plug it in). The new one is attached to the iPad so it charges constantly. The feel of the pencil is really nice.

I am not going to be one of those “reviewers” who complain about iOS not making it truly a laptop replacement. It is not a laptop replacement, and I don’t expect it to be. This is my quick, on the go device, when I need to do some work. When I want to code, I have a MacBook Pro and an iMac, when I have to edit video or audio – same. Could I edit video or audio on this device, yes. Does it match my workflow, no.

Apple will have to, one day, enable real programming on this device. My gut is that is in the works. We shall see.

One thing I really like is the new keyboard folio. The magnets work really well, and the ability to fold it back on the iPad, gives me a much better reading experience. I hope to write a more detailed review in a few weeks, when I’ve used the device a lot more. Can’t wait to share.

Today’s Announcements

What a great line up today from Apple’s latest announcements… A few highlights that caught my eye, and a desire for what I will be buying. They key thing is a ton of rumors have been provided to be true:

1) New MacBook Air – with Retina display, fingerprint reader and T2 chip. This is allowing for better storage, faster SSDs, and more memory. Of course, it now has the butterfly keyboard just like all other macs, I guess Apple is all in on this.

2) New Mac-Mini – this was a long shot by most rumors, but it has happened. They have again put the T2 chip in the design, allowing for Faster SSDs, and a whole lot of other options. Up to 64GB of Ram and 2TB SSDs.. a lot of ports, 4 USB-C and 2 USB-A, along with HDMI and Ethernet port. This will make a lot of people very happy.

3) So now we have the iPad Pro, in two sizes, 11 inch and 12.9 inch, with the rumored USB-C adapter, FaceID, and edge to edge display. (Well not really edge to edge, but pretty close – as it is LCD display). Up to 1TB of Storage along with a new A12X Bionic chip. Of course with the new size and shape, they have a new Apple Keyboard (more of a full folio which allows for two viewing angles – so glad to see this), and a new Pencil. The new Pencil accepts a tap and double tap on the pencil to allow for additional shortcuts (programmed by new apps).

4) Of course they showed off the new version of Photoshop for iPad (which will be available sometime next year. Also, 2K showed off their NBA release, pretty amazing graphics.

Other than the software, all items are on sale today and available next week. They obviously were in the queue for the September announcement, but I am guessing they were delayed due to code in iOS 12.1.

12 hours with the iPhone Xs Max and Series 4 Watch

I did not upgrade last year. I had jumped from the iPhone 6s Plus to the iPhone 7Plus because of the major upgrades to the camera. I had jumped from the original Apple Watch to the Series 2 because I wanted to swim with my watch, but I did not upgrade last year. The iPhone X looked amazing, but I wanted the longer battery life that the Plus size offered, and I did not upgrade last year.

I saw the iPhone Xs Max at the launch event, and knew I had to have it. It has not disappointed in the mere 12 hours that I’ve been using it. The screen is amazing! The biggest surprise to me is that the it is actually slightly smaller than my iPhone 7Plus, and as such fits even better in my the pocket.

I won’t bore you on all the technical details, there are plenty of really good blogs and reviews on that. What I hope to do is post a few more entries on the surprises that I have using this new device.

The upgrade I have been really excited about is the Watch Series 4. I am looking forward to the idea of the ECG/EKG sensor. It doesn’t appear to be enabled yet, but the screen size and clarity is greatly improved. The upgrade to this new watch has allowed me to relegate my Series 0 watch for sale. And my Series 2 to now be my sleep monitor. The one function that is missing – no camera, so my prediction of the Series 4 being the new Dick Tracey watch, is not coming true. Oh well, there’s always the Series 6 🙂

Getting ready for Wasted Time V8.0

This summer has been a ton of fun learning how to address SiriKit in WastedTime. The last piece I have been working on is changing the UI to leverage Reactive Swift – AKA RxSwift. This will (hopefully) allow you to start a meeting on your HomePod and then open the app on your iPhone or iPad and just pick right up.

It has been exciting learning new processes and completely (once again) restructuring the internals of WastedTime. You may not notice any differences in the interface, but this is a MAJOR rewrite.

I hope to launch this with the release of iOS 12.0