I need Help!

With Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Easily.Do we see a new series of little helpers to assist us in getting through the day !

Siri and Cortana are part of the listening family of helpers or the Phone A Friend brigade if you remember those gameshows.  You ask them a question and they go out and try and find an answer.  Sometimes they do it well and sometimes they don’t !  They are getting better as they take context, location and the history of the questions into account.

Google Now and Easily.Do are part of a different family of helpers.  They look through locations you tell them, e.g. facebook, email, calendars, linkedin, etc.  and they parse together your day.  They fill in the gaps so if you have 2 meetings at different locations they will give you travel information and any weather detail that might affect you.

In the travel space there are many apps that also fill in gaps, tripit is a good example.  It will take all those emailed itinearies and flight, train, hotel bookings, etc.  and stitch them together.  Again giving you warning on how long it will take you to get from place A to place B and some other useful data along the way.

Some things are missing though and most of this has been focussed on the consumer space.  So here are my thoughts for bringing this into the enterprise.

Clippy (Office Assistant)

Before we do though lets remind ourselves of Clippy.  In 1996 Microsoft introduced its office assistant Clippy (later renamed to Clippit).  It came with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products, looked like a paperclip and tried to understand what you were trying to do and tried to help.

It was seen as intrusive and annoying.

Welcome to the future – hmmm

So looks like we have gone round circle and the idea of assistants is back with us.  It is not really a big surprise.  The amount of information that is thrown our way has grown, we are more mobile and the technology has progressed both in processing capability, location awareness and voice recognition.

So what do we need from this new wave of assistants to help us in the workplace.

1) The assistant needs to know me – It needs to understand my role in the organisation, where I fit in the organisation (reporting place, etc.), it needs to understand the purpose of my division/group, etc. – this is critical in providing relevant information and creating connections.  As an example if I am searching for information on aeroplane wings then the results presented to someone from Research or Design would be different to the results presented to someone from Finance as we can deduce they are after different things.  

2) It needs to know who I work with – not by me telling it but by it learning from my emails, blog posts, content I work on, the sites I visit, my meetings, etc. – having this data again gives the assistant context.  If my work tasks for the day have items such as purchase new machine for tablet pressing and all my searches are around machinery then the assistant can intelligently present me results before I even begin a search and can bring me relevant data such as cost and procurement approach before I even ask.

3) It needs to know what I am working on – again by looking at my emails, meetings, task lists, search queries, etc.

4) It needs to know where I am and where others are – locational data is critical to give contextual information.  If I am visiting a location in NYC from out of town and am have a meeting on a particular topic then the assistant should tell me of other people who are in the same location who are useful to me.  Those people may be located there OR they may also be visiting like myself.

I see an assistant that becomes an integral part of my life and lives across devices and OS’s.   It is always watching my email, calendar and tasklist, monitors my other activities such as location, phone calls I make, blogs, content I tag, and is aware whats happening outside in the world 🙂

My Working Day

When I start the day it already presents my day (think Easily.Do and Google Now).   My day broken up into little cards/components detailing everything I have planned.  It glues it together with other contextual information such as weather and travelling details.

It also provides me information to complete my tasks.  The assistant reviews the detail, pulls relevant information together, maybe background on attendees for meetings, details on what we last worked on together, maybe detail where we match in our profiles, for those tasks it pulls everything including process info and people who have been through the process recently and can help me.

I have a personal assistant in my pocket/hand that is one step ahead of me pulling info for me.  If there are traffic issues making travel to my next appointment impossible it is scheduling a video conference or telepresence without me having to tell it.   If a new attendee gets added to the meeting I get the information on that person to review before the meeting.  If new information comes up at the last minute that is critical to the meeting, again it presents it to me in a timely manner and formated to the device I am using and my current context.

Did I mention I can speak to it and ask it about my day, whats up next, what do I need to know, etc.  and it talks back to me.  Not just presenting that data textually but talking to me when its relevant – again it knows what communication mechanism works based on the context of who I am and where I am.