A Vision for Voice
Work from home and stay put.
Technology anchors us. It anchors our butts to the chair. It anchors our eyes to the screen. I have incredibly nimble fingers that can dance for hours across a keyboard. The rest of my body can dance to the fridge, but that is about it.
Waiting in line at a café, I watch everyone glued to their laptops and cell phones. Wi-Fi, laptops, and cell phones have made us mobile to work from anywhere in the world as long as we stay stationary and don't look up. When you start moving, you either can't focus on the screen or risk banging on something. I have tried. Lucky to be alive.
Why do we need more freedom?
Yes, we gained some freedom by working from home. I got 2 hours less travel time per day. As an introvert, I got more time to think. I spend less on dry cleaning and dining out. I am much more relaxed because I can isolate myself from office politics and focus on productivity. I now go to the local gym for an hour at lunchtime, which increases my productivity in the afternoon. I manage my diet better. I still need to learn portion control.
However, numerous studies illustrate how sitting at a desk all day harms your health and your eyes. Yet, I still sit for 8-10 hours a day. I want to improve my ability to sit less and maintain my productivity.
The freedom to work and move my body. The freedom to work while seeing the world around me. I don't want to have my head encased in a VR headset. Nor do I want a neural implant measuring my brainwaves and trying to manipulate me while waving the "convenience" flag in my face.
The freedom to move my body will come from incorporating voice into our applications—the ability to converse with our applications while we walk in a park or wash dishes.
I spent a couple of months learning Alexa development. Then, I created applications that let me do specific tasks while going for a walk. It's nice. My private Alexa skills list all my emails, and I can choose which ones I want to have read to me.??
I envision a world where everyone can go for regular walks and ask questions like:
I envision a hands-free world like Star Trek, where the captain walks around the ship asking the computer questions. He is entirely mobile.
Me: Alexa, do I have any outstanding tasks?
Alexa: You have three invoice payments outstanding. Would you like to discuss them??
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Me: Yes, please. Could you tell me about the first one?
Alexa: Invoice 448393 from Marine Trading LLC for $821,577.39. The payment is due on?<MM/DD/YYYY>?next week.?
Me: What are the details of the invoice?
Alexa: The invoice is for physical trade 229293 for 11,393.39 bbls of WTI at Cushing. Susan Peters made the trade on <MM/DD/YYYY>.
Me:?I talked about this invoice with Susan last week.?Alexa, please pay the invoice.
Alexa: The invoice payment ID is 292993.
The Inefficiency of Voice vs. Your Quality of Life
This seems inefficient. I hate talking to a computer.?
Yes, if you are talking on your laptop, then it could be more efficient if you are trying to watch your kid's baseball practice while handling a working fire. Very efficient and won't leave you in a panic trying to get your spouse to the field while you run home to your laptop.
Jobs are no longer 9-5 M-F. Most jobs happen when they happen. We are cogs in a machine that is going 24/7/365. Most of us have significant jobs whereby the entire machine starts to squeal and hiss if we don't react.??
There are a lot of products that help us keep our cogs moving.?
Unfortunately, they require us to keep our heads down and glued to a screen.
The next step in quality of work/life balance: Gaining the ability to look up and move away from our screens.
A voice-first world
What would be awesome is if we changed our development strategies to build applications that were voice enabled. Currently, we build applications that work on the web and our phones. What if we added voice capabilities to that list?
Customer demand will need to come first.
Someone must create a virtual assistant that everyone tells their friends about.
There will need to be a cultural shift that long-term sitting is really, really, really bad for our health.
I have faith that this will come. One day we will all be out walking and working in the middle of the day. Vitamin D deficiencies will be a thing of the past.