Predicting the future / Siri, voice and pets

Siri, the voice driven intelligent assistant feature of the Apple iphone 4S reminded me of video we made back in 2000 for British Telecom Cellnet. We were asked to envisage what a future 3G interface might be like to support their spectrum bid. Inspired by Hall 9000 and StarTrek, we assumed the spoken word would be the way to interact with the hand help computer in the future. The video was made for Tui and a close collaborator was Neil Wilson.

We brainstormed lots of user scenarios, but the client was locked into thinking that the mobile was primarily a business tool. The video focused on scheduling, travelling to meetings and making presentations, but we managed to drop-in some mobile behaviours that we thought would be common place in the future.

So what did we get right?

The scenarios maybe humourless, but they’re not a million miles away from the Siri launch videos.

What did we get wrong?

• A Leviathan scroll wheel menu rather than multi-touch
• Applications extending functionality
• Video working well over 3G (… but sold as a key speed benefit during the spectrum auction!)

The Intelligence Assumption

Our basic assumption in the video prototype was that the phone would act like a concierge or human-like assistant.  After hearing Matt Jones talk at the “In Progress” event, (staged by ‘It’s Nice That‘ magazine) maybe that premise is a promise too far. Maybe it is wiser to aim for experiences that connect robots and autonomous services in a way that engineers simpler emotional empathy rather than human-like intelligence. Examples of these types of not-so intelligent connectors to the real world are Little Printer, the learning thermostat and Cryoscope haptic forecaster.

Siri is still in Beta

However, a voice interface does provide the seductive potential to expose and unify services. Outside of America Siri is breaks easily.

Siri is hopelessly crippled for most of the world because it cannot link to maps, directions or local search. The disappointment felt is really similar to the feeling at the first iphone launch.  Jobs said Apple would never allow third parties to develop for the iphone.  There were a few bundled apps, and many of these, particularly messaging, had many flaws. AS history played out, the iphone’s most powerful differentiator is the application ecosystem.

Siri is the ‘doing’ ecosystem

Perhaps ‘Siri’ is distined to become  a new type of ecosystem that lets you command your phone  to ‘do’. There will be an API, where  businesses and brands will have a way of directly interfacing and extending  into the underlying lexicon, actions and  language. Interflora may have an app, but it’s far more interesting to be able to act upon the verbal question “Send my Girlfriend some flowers tomorrow”. Siri could become a doorway to a mirade of actions and third party datasets. This is already appearing in a range of ‘cracked’ usefulness.

Google must see the same thing, and many observers think this is the reason for recent unification of Google privacy polices. Currently in development, Majel will make it possible to offer the whole spectrum of Google’s confusing array of services via voice on android.

Will Siri get good enough?

The real question is whether Siri will actually succeed. It’s bad enough to make you just give up. Sending the voice recording to the cloud for interpretation introduces a very annoying lag.  It has a very high error rate. Even the activation gesture of raising the phone to your ear doesn’t work reliably. On top of these usability issues, there is a human reality that, for some reason, it’s really embarrassing to dictate misunderstood commands to your phone. It took my whole walk from the British Film institute to the millennium foot bridge to successfully dictate one SMS message.

I believe these usability problems will be solved in time, and linking third party services to pet-like ‘intelligence’ in the cloud will transform the perceived usefulness beyond dictation. If I were to make another mobile ‘future’ video today, I’d focus on the ‘Internet of things‘ and how the mobile works with the cloud of semi-intelligent connected objects that will fill our future lives.