New article series, part 1: How do we build Switzerland’s most popular TV BOX?
Daniel Glauser
Chief Product Officer at Sky Switzerland. Think. Design. Build. Launch. Improve. Repeat.
Yesterday, I was giving a talk to requirements engineers and product owners at "B?RN - B?rner Requirements Night" about the Swisscom Box. So I figured I'll try something new and also bring the content of this talk to LinkedIn in the form a series of short articles.
December 2018, Hsinchu, Taiwan. 2 very jetlagged guys (Fabio and myself) together with engineers of our ODM Arcadyan are sitting around a table, discussing how we can bring "Heidi" (working title) aka the Swisscom Voice Assistant into existence. Spread out on the table: Electronic components, speaker units, microphones, set top box parts. And a lot of coffee against the jetlag. We think that if we try to sell a standalone voice device, it will not work. So it will be some kind of Frankenstein hardware, combining the two worlds of IPTV set top box and voice device, with all the capabilities our customers want to see in a TV box, plus the voice capability and loudspeaker similar to an Amazon Echo or Google Mini. Additionally, it also needs to be a media player and offer the possibility to run apps.
But it can certainly not look like Frankensteins monster, but rather like a design object, something customers want to put in their living room in plain sight, with a fabric cover. If they hide it away, the far field voice feature will simply not work.
领英推荐
A bit less than one year later, in November 2019: The campaign is starting. The new box with included far field voice assistant is shown on public displays, in TV commercials, online and in newspapers. In the meantime, it's not "Heidi" anymore, it's "Hey Swisscom". And if you ask it will also answer, for certain use cases via the built in speaker, for others via the TV speakers. The launch is very successful, there are almost four times as many orders between launch and Xmas as we expected! And everyone likes the design of the box and remote control, confirmed by a reddot design award.
What happened in between? This will be part of the next articles in this series.
fürs Gemeinsame mit Blick aufs Ganze
2 年War eine tolle Pr?sentation - herzlichen Dank Daniel! Und weiterhin viel Erfolg!
Fast Network Virtualization & Edge Computing Solutions
2 年You & the Swisscom team has impressed me from the start of that journey. Truly a first mover on these boxes, starting with having the courage to say "we're going to do our own devices because they're so important to our customers", from building the first Android TV OTT device (in Swiss quality) to the first 4K and the first with embedded microphones. You can really be proud of the achievements. A small country, yes maybe, but so modern, so agile, and so customer focused.
Principal Consultant Digital Products | Trainer
2 年Daniel Glauser, vielen Dank für deinen Vortrag an der B?rner Requirements Night. Die Pr?sentation gibt es hier: ?? https://www.europeanporeday.com/baern/
CEO, Co-Founder at Creoir
2 年Great idea Daniel, thanks for sharing the story of this exciting project! Can't wait for the next article ??
Head of Partnerships
2 年This is fantastic!