What does a chatbot need to know?

I got a new iPhone 4S last week, and after having had my last iPhone (the 3G) since January 2009, I was blown away by how much faster the new phone is. Not to mention the value of voice activation - to be able to ask my phone “where am I?” and get an answer almost immediately feels nearly magical.

After seeing all of the various Siri Easter eggs people have been posting, I figured I’d come up with one that would be a softball. But Siri whiffed it:

Well, I thought, maybe it’s my upbringing, with my Greatest Generation grandparents, that makes me think you’d want to teach Siri that the correct answer to “say goodnight, Siri” is “Goodnight, Siri.” And so I went about my day.

The next day, however, I tried again, and I succeeded:

Once I got past my delight that it worked, and the associated delight in hearing the line delivered in Siri’s flat mechanical voice, I started thinking about why the Abbott & Costello routine would have made it into the programmers’ basket of Easter eggs, and Burns & Allen’s closing “say goodnight, Gracie” bit would not have.

AIs, even a fake-AI like Siri, needs a certain amount of cultural savvy to interact with its users, and to project for us what we insist on calling a personality even when it’s not attached to a person. A smart journalist I know thinks that “software personality designer” will be a separate career path within the next decade; I tried convincing him that that was what interaction designers already do, bring personality to their products, but the more time I spend with Siri, the more I start to think that such specialization may actually be necessary, because there is so much to consider and know.

In Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2, there comes a point when they have to teach the AI at the center of the book about all the things its human trainers know that aren’t captured in the literary works they’ve been teaching the AI to read. The catalogue of items goes on for dizzying pages, because, as Powers’s narrator remarks, “worldiness was massive.” It will be interesting to see how and in which ways Siri becomes more worldly, and how that changes the experience of using it.

Until then, though, if anyone from the Siri team reads this: next iteration, the appropriate response to “say goodnight, Siri,” is “Goodnight, Siri.” Thank you, and remember to tip your waitress.

Never trust a computer you can’t lift

Last night, in her reporting on Steve Jobs’s death, Rachel Maddow played a clip from the introduction of the very first Macintosh. If you’ve never seen it before (and I don’t think I had) it’s worth a watch:

At around 3:22, the voice synthesizer on the Mac reads this phrase:

I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN’T LIFT!

The crowd at the demo goes nuts at this, as they should - it’s a well-phrased snark at the then industry standard. But watching it now, with my iPhone, iPad, iPod, and MacBook all close at hand, it’s a promise of the future.

What “never trust a computer you can’t lift” really means is that your computer should fit into your life, not the other way around. The first Mac didn’t just have the infamous handle, it had a carrying case so you could take it to class with you. It had a graphical user interface and a mouse, so you didn’t have to spend years in school, or keep a cheat sheet of key commands on your desk, to get it to add 2+2. It made it easy to make things look good, because people appreciate beauty, and it had an engaging personality. One of my friends kept his Mac Classic alive and running well into the 90s; when another friend walked into his apartment and saw it, she ran up to it and gave it a hug.

Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the idea of making the way people think and act the center of the computing experience. But just like he did with the mouse and the graphical user interface, he took an under-appreciated vision and he built the team that made it a standard. There would almost certainly still be a profession like interaction design if there had never been an Apple. But it would have fewer tools, fewer resources, fewer success stories, and it would almost certainly be a lot smaller. I owe Steve Jobs for frog design, and the six years I spent there, but I also owe him so many of my friends who never worked there at all.

Particularly as someone who spends a lot of time designing for mobile UIs, I owe Steve Jobs a huge thanks. I love to tell the story of the way the frogNY studio reacted to the original iPhone keynote: there was honest-to-God jumping up and down and screaming. And that wasn’t because we were all giant Apple nerds, although we were - it was because we’d all worked on mobile projects that had gone nowhere. You’d come up with something innovative for a telco, but they couldn’t get the handset manufacturers on board, and vice-versa. None of the ideas behind the iPhone were things I hadn’t seen in concept pieces — what made it extraordinary was that it was finally real. Apple was one of the few companies that could have come in and broken the mobile industry’s logjam, and probably the only one of that handful that would do so thoughtfully and usably. Everything that has happened since to make our telephones into our mobile assistants, smart extensions of our homes and lives, comes in some way from that moment. No wonder people were jumping up and down.

Last month I sat with my nephew at his first birthday party and showed him how to scroll through the pictures on my iPhone. He sat transfixed, watching pictures of himself and his sisters go back and forth on the screen. It must have seemed to him, like it still seems to me, like magic. Steve Jobs was no magician, but he gave the designers and engineers he hired a vision, a goal, and a standard to meet. All of us who make things for other people to use are in his debt, and we’ll continue to carry his computers — now even easier to lift.

"We're going to demote the PC"

“Keeping [our] devices in sync is driving us crazy. We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device.”

- Steve Jobs, WWDC 2011 Keynote

Between iCloud and the Wii U announcement, it’s been a great week for multi-screen experiences. Large players in the industry are getting behind the idea that the system is more important than any given platform. I think this will lead in time to a proliferation of new smart devices, and a whole new range of exciting interaction design problems.

What I find myself thinking about is some user research I did in 2007 on the future of mobile connectivity. The iPhone was brand new, 4G connectivity was starting to get built out, and we were being asked to think three to five years out, to what the right offering for our client would be as we looked towards a 2010-2013 timeframe.

One thing that we heard over and over again, from interviewees in a range of demographics, was that they wanted an uninterrupted experience across platforms. “Why should I have to learn a different screen layout on my phone than on my computer?” asked one guy.* “It should look the same, it should work the same.”

We put that point into our research and recommendations, and then more or less ignored it. At least for the short-term tools we were building for the client’s initial rollout, there was no way the UI could be the same on a smartphone as on a desktop. And after a long while struggling with the limitations of a mobile screen, we started to wonder - why would you even want that, anyhow?

What I realize this week, looking at iCloud and Wii U and the rest, is that that our interviewee might have been asking for the same UI, but what he really was looking for was the same experience. He wanted what he’s starting to get - the ability to access the same data, the same documents, the features and functionality from one platform to the next, and move seamlessly across them. John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, says that the writer’s goal is to create “a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind.” We are coming closer - and right on that 3 to 5 year out schedule, no less - to being able to create a vivid and continuous experience. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

* All quotations from memory, and guaranteed unreliable

Apple’s next steps

So, my timing in posting about changing distribution models turned out to be pretty good after all, because today Steve Jobs announced the iTunes integration deal with Starbucks. Once again, Maura is right: this is a super-smart deal. First, Apple and Starbucks are aiming for much the same middle-class, style-and-status-conscious audience, and they are both trying to sell that audience music. Second, both the iTunes store and Starbucks have gotten into the business of not just selling music, but packaging up music on their own — the “iTunes exclusives” for ITMS, and the Hear Music label for Starbucks. Integrate the two, and you’ve got a fairly healthy, easy-to-use distribution channel that totally sidesteps the majors — and which will make Starbucks’s Hear Music label only more appealing to the sort of former Top 10 stars the labels hideously call “legacy artists.” (The sort of people who buy legacy artists tend o be older, and also, therefore less likely to be comfortable with tools like BitTorrent.) New distribution channels, new models, new ways of thinking about selling music. You knew they were going to have to come from outsiders, but I didn’t expect them to come with my double tall soy latte.

Can’t stop the signal

ObDisclaimer: GE, NBCU’s parent company, is a client of my employer’s, but my opinions are my own, and not those of anyone I work for or with. It’s an interesting coincidence that two stories about big changes at media companies happened to hit at just about the same time. Lynn Hirschberg’s profile of Rick Rubin must have been in the works at the NYT magazine for quite literally months — they can’t have known that NBCUniversal would sever its relationship with iTunes at the very same time their story hit the streets. But it’s a sweet coincidence, because both of these stories are, in a way, about the same thing: the failure of the big media conglomerates to know how to deal with the way digital distribution is ripping a hole in their traditional profit model. Fake Steve Jobs, of course, has been all over the NBCU/iTunes story. It’s the ideal target for him, after all: a bloated corporation allows its desire to monetize the hell out of its hits to blind it to the real value it’s gotten out of its relationship with Apple. Sure, Real Steve Jobs and his crew have quasi-arbitrarily set a flat rate price, but NBC, out of everyone, should know that iTunes is already making hits. And part of the way they make hits is not just by making things easily available, but easily viewable, easily movable, and cheap enough that you say “oh what the hell, I’ll try it.” Hell, I downloaded an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent just because James Wolcott kvelled about it, and Wolcott and I haven’t agreed about anything on TV since the third season of Buffy. I still haven’t watched it, but NBCU got their money from me, and it’s there for me on my beloved video iPod the next time I get stuck in an airport. NBCU may think that by going to Amazon or to their new Fox co-venture, they can get me and my two dollars (or even five dollars) away from iTunes. And they can, of course. But then, if we’re being honest, their competition becomes the torrent sites. Am I willing to pay more money for more DRM, or spend time that I don’t even have to be at the computer to download a high-definition copy that I can watch wherever, whenever? With every barrier they put in the way of my purchasing and using their product on my own terms, not theirs, they make it harder to come up with a good argument to stay on the right side of the law — other than the fact that it is the law, of course, which isn’t the way to make friends with the people who you hope will still trust your network’s brand. Rick Rubin is also looking for ways to protect a media brand: Columbia Records. More than most A&R guys, he gets that the solution isn’t more of the same DRM — the Neil Diamond comeback record he produced was collateral damage in the Sony rootkit debacle — but he’s got a warped solution:

To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. “You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You’ll say, ‘Today I want to listen to … Simon and Garfunkel,’ and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now.” …

What Rubin misses here (other than the fact that, as friend of HD Maura Johnston notes at Idolator, “it may be time to say that the ship for all-together-now peer-to-peer services may have sailed”) is that he has just described a music business with no place in it for Columbia Records. Think about it for a minute: his vision for the subscription service, along with being wildly utopian, is totally artist-centered. Now, maybe for a band that was with the same label all the way through its career, the label could conceivably have a role in shaping the artists’ work on this hypothetical service. But that’s not the way most bands operate. I’m not even talking about underground no-hopers like the Mekons, who claim to have never been on a single label for more than two minutes at a time before they found Touch & Go. Even the “new band” Rubin is listening to at the start of Hirschberg’s piece, the Gossip, have been recording since 1999, and it wasn’t on Columbia. Now, on Rubin’s ideal service, what’s the “value proposition,” as the business people say, for the Gossip to sign that Columbia contract in the first place? What Rubin is unwittingly revealing, in his vision of access to records made at every stage of an artist’s career, on every label, all equally accessible, is that the primary role the labels have played is as distributors and gatekeepers. And in a world where distribution stops being a problem, the value of the label as gatekeeper drops too. What is your label doing for you, other than digging you into a financial hole? Why not go the Jonathan Coulton route and do it yourself? True, Coulton’s own version of his story makes it clear that what you need to survive as a DIY pop star is drive, determination, luck, and well-placed friends, but that was the case when Frank Sinatra was recording on Columbia too. Now, how does this come back to TV? It’s the same point — when you don’t need NBC or ABC to distribute your show, why be beholden to their bad business decisions? Fake Steve again, to bring us home:

The producers of content don’t like the TV network system but can’t quite see the way across the divide into my digital world. Some musical artists, like Prince, are figuring it out, but they’re isolated examples. Trust me, however, when I tell you that TV and movie people will figure it out too. These are not stupid people. And they are not un-greedy. Which means their desire for more money and more control and more freedom will lead them to apply their energy into figuring out how to get out of the plantation the TV networks have created for them. They will break free. Mark my words.

You can already see this starting to happen around the edges: MGM’s decision to make Stargate straight-to-DVD movies after the show was cancelled, the Serenity movie, the way pilots have started to get strategically leaked to BitTorrent the way singles are, and so on, but the big crack in the glacier hasn’t happened yet. These big media companies, like big companies everywhere, move slow, and maybe the person who’ll make the jump is still hoping he or she can work the system. And when she realizes she can’t, and it’s not worth it, maybe she’ll follow Coulton’s lead and start releasing a Thing A Week onto the internet. In the old days, they used to call that a series.