Announcing AltBrains Workshop

I'm turning the page today to a new adventure as publisher of AltBrains Workshop LLC, where I create premium content exclusively for Samsung's Bixby multimodal, natural-language-powered personal assistant. The first three capsules are available now:

• Inside the Helmet, with facts and images about the hit Disney+ Star Wars series "The Mandalorian";
• Impeachment Sage, with facts and latest news pertaining to impeachments under the US Constitution; and
• Historical Carbon Dioxide Parts Per Million with the annual record of modern observations at Mauna Loa.

Coming soon:

• Quotations by AltBrains, bringing 5000+ quotes from the Unix fortune command into the #voicefirst era
• Stonehenge Explorer, with hundreds of articles, images, and videos. Co-authors are Graeme Davis and David Jacques of the University of Birmingham.

How to get these capsules: go to your Samsung phone, activate Bixby via button push or "HI, Bixby"; select Marketplace; use the search icon for "AltBrains",

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What does "AltBrains" mean?

A. It's short for "Alternative Brains". Wouldn't it be great if we all had multiple alternative brains that we could spin off to carry out important tasks for us? That's my vision.  

Q. Why a "Workshop"? 

A. Because at this stage in my life I am not building a big company. I am most interested in building a happy, prosperous home for skilled artists and craftsmen.

Q. What is Bixby? 

A. The current Bixby is the second version of Samsung's personal assistant technology. It's built on technology acquired with Samsung's purchase of Viv Labs in 2016. Viv Labs is the successor company to Siri. The team that built Bixby is the team that built Siri before Apple acquired it in 2011.

Q. Why are you focused exclusively on Bixby?  

There's more green space or 'running room' with Bixby for an independent developer than with any of the other voice platforms. While most people in voice would agree, I think, that Samsung is currently in fourth or fifth place in the voice assistant sweepstakes, behind Amazon, Google, and Apple, the company has a lot of strengths that are just beginning to come to bear. There are 160 million Bixby-enabled devices today and Samsung ships 500 million new ones every year. But the Bixby Marketplace is young -- there are only 100 or so capsules available right now. So it's a great time to carve out a position as a leader. And, in my opinion, Samsung is making a more plausible claim to having an unconflicted strategy of putting developers first than any of the other voice assistant companies; this reduces the risk involved in building "third party" apps that might just wind up being cannibalized by the "first party" platform apps.

Then there are some matters of personal fit. The Samsung IDE, Bixby Studio, is extremely well done and provides a single coherent development environment that, because it is basically JavaScript plus a vast array of configuration files, is easier for me to master than the vast wilderness of technologies included in AWS or Google Cloud.  Also important is that the Bixby approach to building AI apps seems to places roughly equal weight on natural language understanding, domain expertise, user experience, and coding. That's a good fit for someone like me who is not a pure coder but has decades of experience with language, publishing, and building internet products. Another element of fit is that because Bixby is multimodal, familiarity with image content is helpful, and it just so happens that I've published scores of heavily pictorial naval history books via my publishing company, Nimble Books LLC.

Finally, the support I've received via the Bixby Premium Developer program has been outstanding, 100x better than anything I could hope for from Amazon or Google. I have my own Slack channel and virtual team. 

Q. What's coming next from AltBrains Workshop? 

A. Lots!

• More capsules that combine rich facts, news, and images.
• Partnerships with individual content providers and corporate customers using monetization options coming in 2020 from Samsung.
• Scaling: a personalized "altbrain" for every user.

Q. How can I get involved?

A. Just ask!