7: Smart Home 🏠 User Experience - Assistance
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- I'm Abraham Lincoln. - Well, welcome to the final installment in our three-part series on the connected home. In this episode, Aaron's going to show us how home automation could improve if it took a tip from a 19th century American cabinet of government and the human brain. You're right to be curious. But shouldn't the smart in smart home really refer to the devices and not the intelligence required of the user?

As always, we're going to try and figure out why things are so confusing today and how we could make them better tomorrow. So Aaron, where should we start, buddy? Yeah, I think it really comes down to what is the motivation? Why do you really want a smart home? Is it because you want to automate things or

Or is it because you want an intelligent house? When I think of an automated home, it makes me think of those Rube Goldberg machines. Do you guys remember in Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure, his breakfast machine? Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. So P.B. Herman lights a candle. The candle eventually burns a rope, which is holding an anvil. And the anvil drops and turns a Ferris wheel, which sends an egg down a tube. And then two suction cups pick up the egg. A plastic bird taps at the egg until it breaks.

Then a pterodactyl swoops in, drops two pieces of toast into a toaster oven. Eventually the egg is cooked, toast is toasted, and the pancakes get flipped by an Abraham Lincoln statue. All of that. Wait, did you say Abraham Winkin? Lincoln. Well, maybe he was Winkin. Oh, Lincoln. Okay. I thought it was like a specific thing that I didn't know about. You know, Abraham Wink Winkin? Yeah.

I wouldn't put it past Peter Herman. But all of that to make breakfast. And that's called a Rube Goldberg machine. And there was one in...

Back to the Future, we've seen them in lots of movies and commercials. They're really fun and they can be infinitely complex. And if you take enough time and effort, you can basically do anything. And doesn't that sound just a little bit like our smart homes with all the configuration that has to be done? But in reality, there's no intelligence involved other than in the one who's doing all that configuration. ♪

But now let's talk about that other dream of the smart home, the dream of Star Trek. Computer music. No, no, not that. Something Latin. Specify. A mambo. That's more like it. That's more like it. That was the worst example of the computer on Star Trek that I could find.

But that's the dream, that there's this intelligent computer that is taking care of the environment around me. And I can interact with it. I can talk to it. And it can make intelligent decisions. But today, the smart home is only as intelligent as the brain that's controlling it. The digital assistant. ♪

Echo has Alexa, Google and Apple have their digital assistants, and these are supposed to bring us into that world of Star Trek, where the home is not just a bunch of ifs and thens and complicated Rube Goldberg machines, but it's an intelligent machine.

being that's making decisions for us. That's allowing us to communicate with our home. So today, these digital assistants, they have some parlor tricks in them. Like you can ask it to tell you a joke. It can tell you the weather. They also have some built-in core functionality, major things that they'll take care of. Something like controlling a thermostat in your house. So my house has a smart thermostat. Set the temperature in the house to 70 degrees.

Okay. I set the thermostat to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Pretty cool. Yeah. Now everything else it's relegated to skills or commands. Now Alexa has over 15,000 available for you, but they're all on a store. You have to go find them on amazon.com or via their, their app. And what are skills? Well, they're really just like apps, right?

except they have no interface. You have to open the app with your voice and then give it a command. So here's a YouTube clip from an account called Top Bots, and they're using this Alexa skill called My Buddy. My Buddy's purpose is to contact friends or family when you experience an emergency. So I want you to listen to this and tell me what's wrong with this user experience. I've fallen and I can't get up.

Alexa, ask my buddy to alert Maria. So what was wrong there? If she just says the wrong thing at the beginning of that, she's going to stay fallen and stay not getting up, right? That's right. And we often associate that phrase, I've fallen and I can't get up, with elderly people that...

may have a difficulty memorizing a bunch of specific commands. They have to reference, if it was like my grandfather would have had to have, you know, had a list on the fridge. He's on the floor. He can't see the list on the fridge of commands to tell Alexa. This woman has fallen on the ground. She's in pain, has a broken hip, and she has to remember the name of the skill is My Buddy.

So she's paid and she can't just say, get me help. She has to say, ask my buddy. Yeah.

- To alert. - To alert my friend to get me off of this floor. - Yeah. - I know they wanted it to be friendly, but they should have named it like, "Oh dear Lord." - Oh yeah, that's right. - Well, Echo is a phone with no screen. Your voice is the finger and you have to remember the app name and tap it with your voice

Now think about your phone. How many apps do you have on, on your phones today? You guys. Way too many. Right. I can't even find them with the screen. Exactly. So you have, you have all these apps and you remember that one app does this, does this one thing and you haven't used it in a long time and you're searching for it, right? Like I'm going, I pull down the search bar and I'm like typing these combinations of

because I can't remember the name of the app. And that's with an interface that you can scroll through that has icons that will help with your memory. But these digital assistants in your home that don't have an interface, all of that is all in your memory. And don't forget that these skills have to be installed by you to even access any of that functionality. So let's compare this implementation of quote unquote intelligence skills.

with how our actual brains work. But first, let's talk again about Abraham Lincoln, not Abraham Winkin. Yeah, the cheeky pancake flipper. That's also British. This one was. Back then, everyone was British. Yeah, of course. Even the president. That's surprising. So,

So a number of years ago, historian Doris Goodwin wrote this book, Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln. He filled his cabinet with men with different ideologies. Some of them campaigned against him, were his adversaries. And he says, yeah, I want to work with these guys. So on one side, William Seward says, Hello, Abraham Lincoln. I am William H. Seward, your Secretary of State. I think you are wrong.

And then on the other side, Salmon Chase says, Hello, Abraham Lincoln. I am Salmon Chase, your secretary of the treasury. And I think you are both wrong. So Goodwin said that by putting his rivals all together, Lincoln was able to have access to a wide range of opinions. And that helped him to make better decisions. He wasn't always looking at things from one viewpoint.

And I highly recommend this book, Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman, which talks all about the subconscious. And it demonstrates that our brains work just like Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet. So I asked neurologist Dr. Elias Bazakos about this team of rivals in the brain. And this is what he had to say. It's a constant tug of war between competing systems that do similar functions.

And so it's kind of that same logic of there's multiple ways to skin a cat. And so your brain is constantly choosing which faculty wins that tug of war. And then that's what your brain executes. That's some fascinating neuroscience stuff. So, yeah, our brains have multiple ways of doing the same things. Let's take memory, for example.

So normal memory. I had a pastrami sandwich yesterday and then I went to the bank and my pin is one, two, three, four. Well, I want to be in your mind. It's like that all day, every day, you guys. It is a party. Yeah.

So memories like that, normal memories, everyday life, they're all being written to the hippocampus. But let's say I was at the bank, do, do, do, do, do, put in my pin code. And then someone comes up behind me, holds me up at gunpoint and takes my money. Yeah.

God. So life really slapped this guy in the face. It really did. Yeah. He dropped his pastrami sandwich. So for whatever reason, the brain decides that it's going to make a duplicate copy of that memory and write it to the amygdala. And the amygdala handles these memories differently. They come back in flashes. Have you ever experienced that where you had this traumatic memory and it just kind of...

Like lightning bolt comes back to you. Right. So in this example, you have two parts of your brain that can both get the job done. They both record memory. And most of the time, the hippocampus wins because it's just the best man for the job. Your amygdala, though, it's always saying, put me in, coach, put me in. And finally, with a gun in your face, your brain says, get in there, amygdala. Now's your time to shine.

And that's just one example. Our brain is filled with all of these subsystems that are capable of doing similar activities, but the brain is making decisions all the time. Which one of these is going to win? They're always fighting against each other. That's our subconscious. That's what makes us intelligent. Now contrast how our intelligent brains work and this concept of quote unquote intelligent digital assistant having these skills or apps.

Instead of acting like our subconscious and making these decisions for us, we're being forced to consciously do all that work. First, we have to install these apps. Imagine having to go to a store and installing your hippocampus and your amygdala. But once installed, it's up to you to decide which of those installed skills is best at fulfilling your request. It's up to you to decide which app is best at communication when you're on the floor in pain.

It's up to you to remember the name of that skill is my buddy. Not a thing you hope to use a lot, right? Not something you're going to do enough to be written on the old hippocampus. That's right. So these assistants should function more like our brains.

We shouldn't have to think about skill names and very specific commands. We should only be thinking about our problem. What do we want solved? These thousands of skills should be fighting their way to the top to be the one that gets to solve that problem. So let's say you want to take a ride to the airport. Instead of telling your digital assistant which service you want to take, shouldn't you be able to just say, get me a ride to the airport? Then it goes out and starts evaluating.

It finds an Uber car that's 10 minutes away, but there's also a Lyft car that's five minutes further and $5 cheaper. So your digital assistant goes into your calendar. It looks at how much time you have. It takes a look at traffic and decides you've got plenty of time. I'm going to get you the $5 cheaper one. It calls that Lyft car for you and it just shows up.

Yeah, we need these services to be utilities. We shouldn't have to think about who's providing it. It's just that, you know, when you ask it, they're all competing to be the provider of that service or that utility to you. Exactly. And that's why I think it's such a shame that they went with that App Store model. That's great for your phone, but it just doesn't work for digital assistants.

I really wish that they went with more of a music streaming model. An artist doesn't get paid for how many times an album gets added to a library. Instead, they get paid every time a track is played. And that's exactly how skills should work. Rob comes up with a really powerful skill and it gets added to this ecosystem.

Then as people present their digital assistant a problem and his gets chosen, well, then he gets paid. Maybe a penny, maybe 0.01 cents. But as millions and millions of people present their problem and their digital assistant says, hey, I'm going to use Rob's skill, then he makes a lot of money. But not only does Rob get paid, but you get to benefit from this massive ecosystem filled with skills and capabilities that are fighting for the right to answer your requests.

Your digital assistant is choosing the best one based on your environment, your location, or other circumstances without any effort on your part. This system is quietly gaining more and more capabilities. Each time you ask it something, it's fulfilling your request with better, faster, more powerful skills. Finally, you'd have a smart home. ♪

Alright guys, so that was a great discussion. What should we talk about on our next episode? I think we've got a lot of interesting topics that we can do, but I think I'm going to go with shopping. Shopping? Like what kind of shopping? Just, I don't know, brick and mortar shopping. Seems based on the past. What is that experience like now? How have we gotten to where we are and how can it get better? Okay, cool. So...

Do you have an opinion on the UX of shopping? When do you shop online and when do you prefer to go into a store? Have you had any great experiences? Any horrible ones? If you have something to share, do us a favor and call our idea line 612-208-6686 and leave us a message. If it fits, you might hear your voice on a future episode. As always, thanks for hanging out. We'll look forward to seeing you next time on Ideate.