Tag Archives: iPhone

Mobility, Technology

iPhone Notifications Need an Upgrade

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Color Coded Notification Cards

I have a swarm of notifications from many sources, and yes, the header source name and icon does help differentiate between notification sources, but it’s relatively tiny, and I have the 8+. Developers and/or User Settings should allow for the color-coding of the header, and the body of the notification cards by App Name, or App Category (“Gaming”)

Notification Transitions – Active and Passive

When the iPhone screen is in passive (sleep) mode or the screen is active, the ability to transition the notification in and out could be fun, such as when using PowerPoint slide transitions.

Notifications List by Source – Filter + Sort Order

I’m constantly scrolling through my notifications for specific Notification sources’ updates. It would be great if the user can sort Notifications not just by the latest updates. Maybe allow alphabetical sort order. Or, allow the user to Filter by only the notifications they need at the moment, instead of being lost in a sea of notifications. For example, allow the user to Filter the notification list by specific app notifications.

AI, Digital Assistant, Mobility, Technology, Uncategorized

As your Digital Assistant, Siri Will Answer Incoming Calls

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Voice mail is so LAST Century. It’s a static communications interface to address your incoming phone calls. It’s a dinosaur in terms of communications protocol. Yes, a digital assistant, or chat bots should “field” your incoming calls, providing your callers a higher level of service.

Business or Personal?

Why not both? There are use cases which highlight the value of a Digital Assistant answering your phone calls when you’re unavailable.

Trusted Friends and Business Pins

Level of available services may change based upon the level of trusted access, such as:

  • Friends Seeking Your Availability for a Hockey Game Next Week
  • Business Partners Sharing Information access such as invoices

Untrusted Caller Access

  • The Vetting of Unsolicited Calls, such as robocalls

Defining and Default Dialogs

Users can define dialogs through drop and drag workflow diagram tools making it easy to “build” conversations / dialogs flows. In addition, out of the box flows can provide administrators with opportunities and discover the ways in which AI digital assistant may be leveraged.

Canned / Default dialog templates to handle the most common dialogs / workflows will empower users to the implement rapidly.

Any Acquisitions in the Pipeline?

Are the big names in the Digital Assistant space looking to partner or acquire tools that can easily transform workflows to be leveraged by digital assistant?

  • IBM’s Conversations – chatbot dialog definition tool
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions

APIs available on Mobile OS SDKs?

Are the components available for third party product companies to extend the Mobile OS capabilities as of now? Or are the mobile OS companies the only ones in a possession of performing these upgrades?

Business, Economy, Education, Entertainment, Healthcare, Technology, Work

AI Digital Assistant verse Search Engines

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Aren’t AI Digital Assistants just like Search Engines? They both try to recognize your question or human utterance as best as possible to serve up your requested content. E.g.classic FAQ. The difference in the FAQ use case is the proprietary information from the company hosting the digital assistant may not be available on the internet.

Another difference between the Digital Assistant and a Search Engine is the ability of the Digital Assistant to ‘guide’ a person through a series of questions, enabling elaboration, to provide the user a more precise answer.

The Digital Assistant may use an interactive dialog to guide the user through a process, and not just supply the ‘most correct’ responses. Many people have flocked to YouTube for instructional type of interactive medium. When multiple workflow paths can be followed, the Digital Assistant has the upper hand.

The Digital Assistant has the capability of interfacing with 3rd parties (E.g. data stores with API access). For example, there may be a Digital Assistant hosted by Medical Insurance Co that has the ability to not only check the status of a claim, but also send correspondence to a medical practitioner on your behalf. A huge pain to call the insurance company, then the Dr office, then the insurance company again. Even the HIPPA release could be authenticated in real time, in line during the chat.  A digital assistant may be able to create a chat session with multiple participants.

Digital Assistants overruling capabilities over Search Engines are the ability to ‘escalate’ at any time during the Digital Assistant interaction. People are then queued for the next available human agent.

There have been attempts in the past, such as Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering-focused e-business.  Google Questions and Answers (Google Otvety, Google Ответы) was a free knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to collaboratively find good answers, through the web, to their questions (also referred as Google Knowledge Search).

My opinions are my own, and do not reflect my employer’s viewpoint.
Business, Economy, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Help, Media, Mobility, Music, Reviews, Technology

Hey Siri, Ready for an Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple? Guess Who’s Suing.

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The AI personal assistant with the “most usage” spanning  connectivity across all smart devices, will be the anchor upon which users will gravitate to control their ‘automated’ lives.  An Amazon commercial just aired which depicted  a dad with his daughter, and the daughter was crying about her boyfriend who happened to be in the front yard yelling for her.  The dad says to Amazon’s Alexa, sprinklers on, and yes, the boyfriend got soaked.

What is so special about top spot for the AI Personal Assistant? Controlling the ‘funnel’ upon which all information is accessed, and actions are taken means the intelligent ability to:

  • Serve up content / information, which could then be mixed in with advertisements, or ‘intelligent suggestions’ based on historical data, i.e. machine learning.
  • Proactive, suggestive actions  may lead to sales of goods and services. e.g. AI Personal Assistant flags potential ‘buys’ from eBay based on user profiles.

Three main sources of AI Personal Assistant value add:

  • A portal to the “outside” world; E.g. If I need information, I wouldn’t “surf the web” I would ask Cortana to go “Research” XYZ;   in the Business Intelligence / data warehousing space, a business analyst may need to run a few queries in order to get the information they wanted.  In the same token, Microsoft Cortana may come back to you several times to ask “for your guidance”
  • An abstraction layer between the user and their apps;  The user need not ‘lift a finger’ to any app outside the Personal Assistant with noted exceptions like playing a game for you.
  • User Profiles derived from the first two points; I.e. data collection on everything from spending habits, or other day to day  rituals.

Proactive and chatty assistants may win the “Assistant of Choice” on all platforms.  Being proactive means collecting data more often then when it’s just you asking questions ADHOC.  Proactive AI Personal Assistants that are Geo Aware may may make “timely appropriate interruptions”(notifications) that may be based on time and location.  E.g. “Don’t forget milk” says Siri,  as your passing the grocery store.  Around the time I leave work Google maps tells me if I have traffic and my ETA.

It’s possible for the [non-native] AI Personal Assistant to become the ‘abstract’ layer on top of ANY mobile OS (iOS, Android), and is the funnel by which all actions / requests are triggered.

Microsoft Corona has an iOS app and widget, which is wrapped around the OS.  Tighter integration may be possible but not allowed by the iOS, the iPhone, and the Apple Co. Note: Google’s Allo does not provide an iOS widget at the time of this writing.

Antitrust violation by mobile smartphone maker Apple:  iOS must allow for the ‘substitution’ of a competitive AI Personal Assistant to be triggered in the same manner as the native Siri,  “press and hold home button” capability that launches the default packaged iOS assistant Siri.
Reminiscent of the Microsoft IE Browser / OS antitrust violations in the past.

Holding the iPhone Home button brings up Siri. There should be an OS setting to swap out which Assistant is to be used with the mobile OS as the default.  Today, the iPhone / iPad iOS only supports “Siri” under the Settings menu.

ANY AI Personal assistant should be allowed to replace the default OS Personal assistant from Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana to any startup company with expertise and resources needed to build, and deploy a Personal Assistant solution.  Has Apple has taken steps to tightly couple Siri with it’s iOS?

AI Personal Assistant ‘Wish” list:

  • Interactive, Voice Menu Driven Dialog; The AI Personal Assistant should know what installed [mobile] apps exist, as well as their actionable, hierarchical taxonomy of feature / functions.   The Assistant should, for example, ask which application the user wants to use, and if not known by the user, the assistant should verbally / visually list the apps.  After the user selects the app, the Assistant should then provide a list of function choices for that application; e.g. “Press 1 for “Play Song”
    • The interactive voice menu should also provide a level of abstraction when available, e.g. User need not select the app, and just say “Create Reminder”.  There may be several applications on the Smartphone that do the same thing, such as Note Taking and Reminders.  In the OS Settings, under the soon to be NEW menu ‘ AI Personal Assistant’, a list of installed system applications compatible with this “AI Personal Assistant” service layer should be listed, and should be grouped by sets of categories defined by the Mobile OS.
  • Capability to interact with IoT using user defined workflows.  Hardware and software may exist in the Cloud.
  • Ever tighter integration with native as well as 3rd party apps, e.g. Google Allo and Google Keep.

Apple could already be making the changes as a natural course of their product evolution.  Even if the ‘big boys’ don’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest, all you need is VC and a few good programmers to pick a fight with Apple.

Business, Development, Mobility, Personal, Technology

Apple iOS Email: Boldly Building an AI Rules Engine

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When selecting the ‘flag’ option on an email, one of the menu options shown is ‘Notify Me…’  When anyone replies to that email thread, the person/me is notified.

This Apple iOS email feature, ‘Notify Me…” seems like a toe dip into an AI Email Rules Engine with the one condition and without customization. Is a full blown engine in the Apple product roadmap akin to Outlook?  Has this feature been ‘out there’ for awhile, and I just missed it?

Regardless, a more powerful, robust AI Rules engine, yet keeping the iOS simple, and elegant design could enhance business savvy user’s experience.

Notify Me Feature
Notify Me Feature

Business, Mobility, Technology

CES 2013 Show: Huawei, and iPhone 5S/U, or U for Unsatisfied

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At the show they had a red phone under a glass case,and it looked top secret.  At first glance, when you approached the booth, the sales team seemed on the defensive about their product, and their placement in the marketplace, in the same arena as Samsung.  As the conversation progressed, a more relaxed approached began to take place, and they even took their phone out of the glass case for me.  I must say that they seem to be trying to bring their A Game with a Quad Core processor, Al be it 1.5 GHz, it was still an impressive device, and the specs may be found here.

We had a candid conversation, and I said to play in the global markets, they need to break the 4 GB barrier.  Apple has now stunned the mobile community with the 64 Bit processor to get ready to raise the roof on memory.  However, anyone who understands addressing, the 64 bit addresses will each take up more memory than their 32 bit counterpart, e.g. takes more memory to run each application, but if you have raised the amount of memory on the device, no problem.  Unfortunately, Apple iPhone 5S has not raised the memory but has implied the 64 bit processor is the first step, getting their OS, and developers ready to manage more memory.  I think it might have been in the cards but it’s too late.

Consequence, fewer applications may run in a 64 bit addressable processor without running out of memory in multi-threaded mode.  Here is an example register under the Windows Chip Architecture, not exactly apples and oranges, but the analogy is similar.

Win 32 v. 64

 

As a side note, back to the Asia market, here is an infographic which iterates through the opportunities in those consumer markets. Very interesting.

APJE Smartphone Vendor

 

Technology

Report: Apple testing 64-bit iPhone processor with a “motion tracking” chip — Tech News and Analysis

Report: Apple testing 64-bit iPhone processor with a “motion tracking” chip — Tech News and Analysis.

The 64 Bit Chip would certainly make the mobile race interesting. Having a like for like comparison of processing speed, with a similar app on Android, Apple, and Microsoft Mobile operating systems would be ideal, and the results published.

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Business, Technology

2013 CES Highlight: I now have one less use for my wife, thanks i-Massager

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I was just reviewing some of the photos from the 2013 Computer Electronics Show, and showed her this i-Massager image.  I told her you’d probably have one less use for me if you had this device.  She looked at the device, and said, oh, that looks, nice.  Then she asked if it could be used with an iTouch or iPhone, then gave a nod, and smiled.  She was kidding, right?

iMassager
iMassager