Natural selection

Dmitry Bagrov - Director of DataArt UK - about how the latest technologies affect everyday life, the real reasons for the success and failure of gadget manufacturers and sources of inspiration for engineers.

I love science fiction very much and often find analogies with it in ordinary life. For example, many devices entering the market in one form or another have previously appeared in movies. There was such a film - “She” (“Her”) with Joaquin Phoenix, where Scarlett Johansson voiced artificial intelligence - Samantha. If you don’t remember it or remember it badly, be sure to take a look! Here, the creators just turned to the gadgets that already existed in real life at the time of the filming, just according to the script they were brought to a new, noticeably more advanced level. And watching how the author imagines the future of emerging technologies is extremely exciting.
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There is a very interesting exercise for yourself - to take some device that has already gone on sale, and try to use the maximum of its capabilities in everyday life. It is clear that from the recently released gadgets iPhone 7 attracted the most attention. And not everyone noticed the main news, and it is that the smartphone is beginning to claim the position of the central hub, which links together various areas of the user's life. There is already Apple with its HomeKit and Google with its Google Home, which, by the way, has been operating in this area for a long time. But to see how beautiful devices work in real life is worth your own. Because the question of whether there are cases in real life when all interesting functions in theory can be useful is still open.

I constantly use the fact that in England, where I now live, any goods purchased in stores can be returned within two weeks. At the same time, I buy a huge amount of all sorts of devices, play with them and return them if I don’t like them. And I must say that I bring about 95% of everything I take back to the store. Probably the biggest disappointment is that almost all of these things exist on their own. Against the background of a huge number of “smart devices” for the home: locks, thermostats, batteries and light bulbs - very few devices that really fit into everyday life.

For example, I decided to play with Amazon Echo even before it officially appeared in England: here sales began at the end of September, but I bought the American version on eBay. It was immediately clear that all location-based-services would not work, because the American Echo thought that I was living in Seattle, and completely refused to change my mind. But, nevertheless, it was very interesting to see which use case would be the most popular for me.

Will I call a Uber taxi using voice dialing? Most likely not, because calling it through the application is much more convenient and faster. You put a mark on the map, and the car drives exactly where you need it. Will I ask Alexa to play music for me? Maybe I will, maybe not, it depends on my mood. But given that the speaker in Amazon Echo is not so good, I have serious doubts about this. But really useful use case - when after 10 minutes Echo reminds you that it's time to turn off the pasta.

British Gas, which sells electricity and gas, is doing a lot in the direction of smart home - they bought a company that produced smart devices and software for them. They adapted them for their system, installed on thermostats and sold to a large number of users. And this is very much in demand, since it corresponds to the realities of life in England, where there is no centralized hot water supply. It is no coincidence, by the way, British Gas was one of the partners of the launch of Amazon Echo in England. Imagine a standard situation: I wanted to go to the shower at 10 pm and, passing by the boiler, I simply said: “Heat the water.” And it heats it. Will I use it? Probably, I will, because it is convenient.

Science fiction always features a voice interface of various types of technology. Small children often ask the household appliances to do something out loud: “Refrigerator, please give me yogurt!” This is, of course, ridiculous, but if you look at it from the other side, this is a natural communication interface, and it’s like communicate with each other. To make a request is as natural as talking to a familiar person - we do not send him a request to start a conversation. And we build our proposals in the way we like, without adapting ourselves specifically to how the interlocutor should understand them, at least in ordinary everyday conversation. I can not say that I see on the street people who regularly communicate with Siri and Google Now, despite the huge money invested in their promotion. And there is no secret - it is just inconvenient, it is an unnatural interface, which, however, should be a step towards the natural interface. But now you need to adjust all the time to be understood, and until normal speech recognition appears, nothing will work.

In recent years, a lot has been written that the new generation has completely changed the way they communicate with the world. Nothing like this has changed. It is clearly seen that the new generation (those who are now 18 to 25 years old) just want to communicate with the world naturally - through conversation, through questions. Yes, now we use not only the voice and often interact with the help of the text, but the essence remains the same. A teenager in the same way wants to communicate with an artificial organism in the same way as with his classmate. Therefore, all the many light bulbs laid out around smart homes, remain toys for geeks.

For example, sitting down to watch TV in the evening, I want to make the lighting a little softer. I have to go into my smartphone, find an application there, choose a lamp in it that hangs above my head, set the temperature of the light to it. Is this natural behavior for a person? Perhaps someone is useful in order to boast to the girl. But even here there is a chance that she will look at the landlord, as if she were crazy. Because doing the same thing with the switch is much easier and faster.

Apple understands this very well - just look at what they did with their HomeKit. They did not release it for general use until it became clear that HomeKit has the potential to occupy that niche in which the new technology is in demand. HomeKit is a kind of central hub connecting a huge number of different devices, each of which is controlled by its own applications. This is true even for the Apple platform, not to mention the more fragmented Android. In order for this parafernalia to become more interesting than more than 15% of the pioneers who simply like to try any new technology, it is necessary to make it so that it will be embedded in the people's habitual life. Amazon Echo can claim this because there is a very clear use case when it will be naturally useful. He can remind me to leave the house after 10 minutes, call my mother two days later, that my wife has a birthday two weeks later, and I wanted her to buy a gift.

Talk about a virtual personal assistant, which will write everything for you and will not let you forget about anything, has also been going on for a long time. The natural interface to communicate with such an assistant is the voice. There are several companies, for example, x.ai, which offer virtual personal assistant services - it’s enough to put it in a copy, just like you would put an ordinary secretary, and he will organize the necessary meetings for you. A few months ago on bloomberg.com there was an interesting article about the level of automation in these companies - it turns out that in many it is very low. Helpers are often not virtual at all — all living people do the work remotely! And in one of the companies selling these services, letters that are sent on behalf of this assistant automatically insert advertisements for keywords.

All of this is directly related to the conversation that the paradigm of communication has changed. Nothing has changed, because man is a very inertial creature. There are new tools that can be compared with an electric screwdriver: the only difference is that now the screws do not have to be wrapped with a conventional screwdriver, but in the process of their rotation, everything remained the same. There are companies that understand this very clearly. I'm not sure that Apple is still one of them, but they have enough people left who clearly realize that you need not just to create a beautiful toy, but to find a niche where you cannot live without this toy. So it was with the iPad - who would know that the iPhone overgrown would be such a popular device and create a new area and a new class of devices.

If you look at new devices from this point of view, you can see a lot of interesting things. For example, Lenovo announced at the IFA exhibition in Berlin and has already started selling Yoga Book. I, of course, ordered it and played - this is actually a small Wacom drawing pad on which you can draw, combined with a laptop. It can be opened in the form of a laptop, turn on the virtual keyboard — the key backlighting — and type. You can open it completely, and if you are going to write or draw, simply turn off the keyboard. The idea is excellent, but the Yoga Book won't still be able to replace the pen and paper! For a very simple reason - some usual actions cannot be done with it. For example, with a pen designed for it, I can write on paper, but for this I need to change the rods: ink to hollow plastic and vice versa. But I want to scribble on a piece of paper and immediately draw on the screen, and replacing the rod - in this case, the action is unnatural. In a paper notebook, I just turn the page, here, if you are using OneNote, you need to create a new one.

It may be the next update, where everything will be easier, but because I just want to write and not think about how the screen is located. In the version on Windows, for example, I cannot reveal it completely - I always have a piece of paper on the right side, a screen on the left side. I can open the version that works on Android, but then the screen will be face down. And on the table can be anything, from spilled coffee to grains of sand that will scratch the screen. In the end, I was very upset because I sincerely wanted the handwriting function to really work.

Of course, someday it will be brought to mind, but it seems to me that what Steve Jobs understood, the rest of the developers declare, but they don’t really feel. And the meaning is simple - you need to help people with what they are already doing. Simon Seneca has a book called “Start with Why” (“Start with Why”). He cites a good theory - according to her, all companies should know three things about themselves: what they do, how they do it and why they do it. But in fact, companies that really know why they are doing something are very few. One of them is Wallmart, the other is Apple, which says: “We make your life the way you like it. In addition, we make computers and phones. "

All that is needed is a banal ability to look at things, placing them in the context of real life. When will a voice notification appear in the phone, capable of informing who the SMS has come from? I do not demand anything else, I don’t even want her to read it. But when I drive a car, and I have the phone as a navigator, having received a message, I have to think whether my wife, who does not start the car, writes me, or the store, who decided to offer me a discount. Of course, this can be solved, but the situation needs to be modeled in advance, put a special signal on the number of the wife and another signal on all other numbers. But why can't a smartphone just say: “You received a message from your wife. Do you want to read? ". Siri can not understand my Nizhny Novgorod accent and, in principle, requires that the user is specially adjusted to communicate with her.

The voice interface is a great way for people in a foreign country to order some services in an unfamiliar language without relying on the goodwill of the concierge or translator. I came, for example, to Bulgaria, I don’t speak Bulgarian, if I’m not in Sofia, but somewhere in a small town, perhaps the hotel staff knows little English. How can I order a taxi? I go downstairs and ask for the concierge, hoping that he will call me a normal car for an adequate amount, and will not get his own penny from every taxi driver. Why not put in my room, say, Amazon Echo, who doesn't care what language I speak to him? The user-friendly interface relieves me of a headache, especially since we trust the opinion of the Internet community much more than the opinion of one individual expert. When my friends and I were in Krakow, we suddenly wanted meat. We went to Foursquare and found some kind of Australian burger one, which we could easily have passed four times. And we would never have found these great Australians if it were not for an absolutely specific technology.

Why is the Smart Watch industry not taking off with the force that many hope for? Because in reality there is no special use case for smart watches. In the end, looking at the clock during a call is even less decent than getting a phone out of your pocket. Now it is clear that these devices are really in demand for all sorts of applications for sports and health. But this does not need 100 or even 20 percent of people. Probably in California this percentage is higher than in Oklahoma or in most countries on earth. Not everyone needs a clock that decides that it is necessary to get up in the morning — for many people, it will be necessary to do so, and an ordinary alarm clock can wake them up.

Why did Google Glass fail? Because it is unnatural. Why will Microsoft HoloLens be pretty successful? Because they are embedded in the existing use case. The video link, which began with a regular phone call to each other, has grown to multichannel video conferencing. Now we are witnessing the next stage in the development of the same thing: action — as before, a conversation with an interlocutor, only the mode of communication has changed. If you think about it, it turns out to be funny - we started by saying that we stopped seeing the interlocutor, and gradually almost returned to the fact that the best way to talk is to meet in person, even if using video.

Therefore - where is that Steve Jobs, who in the end will look at everything that appears, and will authoritatively say that it is necessary to integrate into important and familiar processes of people. The genius of Steve Jobs is not that he explained how something needs to be done, but that he was able to see how others do something and make the same thing easier.