First Date with Siri

So I got an iPhone. Two years on Blackberry, then two years on Android, and finally I've admitted that it really is just a great interface. There are still a few things I miss from my ol' Droid, but even after one day I'm rapidly getting used to it.

A colleague came with me to the store to get it, and on the way back to work he asked a question the magnitude of which had not previously occurred to me:

Have you used Siri yet?

Of course I've heard and read about Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface), the "intelligent" software that acts as a sort of personal assistant and voice-activated search engine. Mostly, I'd read the funny responses Apple engineers had pre-programmed in to certain questions like: "What are you wearing?" (Answer: Aluminum body with glass front and back), or "What's the meaning of life?" (Answer varies, I got: "I don't know, but I think there's an app for that."). Sometimes Siri needs extra information to help you out, as in when you say "I need to hide a body." Siri responds, "What kind of place are you looking for?" with options to search for nearby reservoirs, metal foundries, mines, dumps, or swamps.

But there's a bit more to Siri than that. I've heard several people commenting on "her" personality. Around Christmastime, even my mom talked about Siri as if she were an old friend who helps her out--and just happens to hang out in her purse.

So, walking down the street with my colleague, new iPhone in hand, I considered what my first interaction with Siri would be. I admit, I was a little nervous. What should I ask first? How do I introduce myself? What if she doesn't understand me? What if she doesn't like me? I held my finger over the button that activated Siri for a moment, then:

"Hello?"

"Hello, Andrew."

"Um, how are you today?"

"I am well. What can I help you with?"

"Um, nothing right now, thank you."

"Ok."

It seems Siri and I are off to a polite, if a little cool, start. We're still working a bit on our rapport, but I'm sure we'll get there. Even this morning I asked Siri to remind me to do something later, and was surprised at the accuracy of the dictation. I was a little skeptical, but I think I might be coming around.

Then I discovered Siri's Australian accent in the settings. Oh my, I think I'm in love.

Cutting the Cable

Growing up, our house had cable TV for approximately three months. It was while we were living in an "in-between" apartment while the place we were moving to was not yet ready, and it happened to be cable-ready (which was a big deal in those days). So we had a little cable box on the top of our TV. And with it, I watched "Ren and Stimpy" hour after hour. That's about it.

As a kid, I barely remember anyone having cable TV. In the olden days (oh no, I'm turning into one of those) our TV had rabbit-ear antennae that just barely picked up five or six channels. The major networks were on the VHF* dial; CBS on channel 2, NBC on channel 4, and ABC on channel 7. On the UHF dial were channels 20, 50, and on a clear day, 62. I don't remember too much about those channels, except that Star Trek was on one of them. And really, what else mattered?

Once the 90's hit, it seemed cable was everywhere--or at least, everywhere in my friends' houses. The number of channels even on broadcast TV exploded, merged, bought each other, and added off-shoot channels. Somewhere in there was the short period of "Ren and Stimpy" mentioned earlier, and that was exciting. Literally tens of channels! But when it was back to broadcast TV afterward, I didn't really feel like I was missing anything.

In college, my freshman dorm room had the campus cable. My room-mate brought a TV, and we hooked it up, and watched it once. One movie, about an hour and a half. I later moved off-campus, and though I had a TV, I had neither cable or rabbit-ears, so it was in practice only for watching movies and sitting drinks upon. Besides, the internet was the only necessary source of news and entertainment by then.

Moving to NYC meant no television at all for years. Not that it was unavailable, mostly because I was busy, a poor grad student, and had better things to do. Not until I moved into 90 West, and even then only because my room-mate had already had one, and it was hooked up to cable. As silly as it sounds, I was surprised at the sheer volume of content available. Hundreds of channels! So many, in fact, that I didn't watch any of them. Instead, I signed up for Netflix.

But ever since, I've had cable. Why? Because it came with internet access, or there was some promotional deal, or something convinced me that it'd be more effort to get rid of it than to keep it. But we don't really watch anything. Sure, there are some good shows on these days, but they're also on Netflix, Hulu, or even the websites of the TV networks themselves. We end up turning on the ol' tube (which is funny, because I haven't had a TV with a cathode ray tube since college) whenever we have nothing better to do. This invariably means we end up watching HGTV (or worse, "How Clean is Your House") until we can no longer stand it.

So, we cut the cable. There are tons of people "cutting the cable" these days, in protest to the rising prices or the monopolies of most cable providers, or as a statement that the internet provides the same content for less. We certainly aren't going to miss the higher bills, and we certainly will get whatever shows we really want to watch through the internet. But mostly, we're getting rid of it just because we don't watch.  Or at least, we're ashamed of what we do watch.

And if our home is a little quieter for it, well, that's hardly anything to complain about.


* For those who may not remember, back in the day TV was an analog phenomenon, with VHF (Very High Frequency) and UHF (Ultra High Frequency) defining two ranges of radio frequency used to broadcast television signals. I remember being incredibly excited at the discovery that TV and radio were in effect the same thing. I used to try and impress my friends by tuning the analog car radio tuner all the way down to the bottom of the FM range, where you could sometimes pick up the audio from the TV stations. To my great surprise, this never seemed to impress them.

The Suprising Power of Twitter

I'll be the first to admit, I was very skeptical of Twitter when I first heard about it.  Yet another social network?  Wait, you're telling me this one is just one-way short messages blasted out to the world with no context?  Hold on now, they're limited to 140 characters?  Why in the world would anyone care what I have to "tweet" about.  And why in the world would I want to "follow" anyone else when I have Facebook?

Eventually, though, I joined Twitter a little over a year and change ago.  But I had an excuse!  It was for work!  Slowly, I came to like the immediacy of it, especially in how it could surface trending links on the web that were interesting or funny.  Eventually, I plugged it into Facebook so that when I tweeted something, that tweet also became my Facebook status.  I did this because I have a Blackberry Curve phone, and the Facebook app for Blackberry is not the easiest thing to use, but the Twitter app was great.  These days, I find I use Twitter differently from Facebook.  It's easy to have short, quick, conversations.  It's still useful in finding interesting and funny content out in the wild.  And it's a useful way of sharing things that I find interesting.  And you know what, it turns out I do care what some of my friends are tweeting.  More surprisingly, they care about what I'm tweeting.

But I've only recently come to a stunning and powerful discovery.  Twitter, more than any other means of communication, has a powerful advantage when it comes to dealing with large corporations.


Case Study No. 1: Time Warner Cable

Everyone I have ever met who has interacted Time Warner Cable hates it.  They have something of a monopoly on the cable and ISP sector here in NYC (at least until some other networks finish building their infrastructure).  They're expensive, notoriously slow in scheduling appointments or doing basically anything, and the only way to get anything done is to call them.  Calling them, of course, requires more patience and perseverance than the average person can comprehend, since the folks answering the calls are generally not empowered to do anything beyond the most basic functions.

Last week, I called Time Warner Cable to schedule an appointment for them to pick up our cable box and modem and cancel the account on our current apartment.  I would take any appointment at all, I told them, so long as it was on or before the 30th of May.  They told me the next available appointment was June 8th.  I explained that I would not be living in this city on that day, and that since the "appointment" consists of them driving by, picking up the box, and leaving, I was sure they could squeeze in something.  This is a dense city, the Time Warner trucks are in the neighborhood every day.  Surely, surely they could make a two-minute stop along the way sometime in the next ten days.  No, they said, no room for appointments.  I'll spare you the details, largely because they involve me yelling, but after talking to several people and three managers, I finally reached the head of the call center in Wisconsin.  She finally explained to me that she did not have the authority to over-ride the computer scheduling program.  And she did not have the phone number of anyone who did.  And she was the boss of her office, so there was no one she could escalate me to.  Oh, she could call the Brooklyn or Manhattan offices, but even those calls would be diverted to her call center, and she'd only get one of her employees on the line.  Bottom line: There was nothing she could do.  And this was after being on the phone for nearly two hours.

Frustrated, angry, and defeated, I finally agreed to drag the box to their office myself and drop it off some day in the future, the only option I was left with.  After hanging up the phone, I vented on Twitter.  "@TWCable_NYC won't pick up our equipment, and they'll charge us until we take it to them. Customer service fail. @TWCableHelp"  Almost immediately, Bryan, one of the many folks behind the @TWCableHelp account tweeted back.  Over a few quick back-and-forth tweets, I explained my frustration, and he offered to help.  I sent him my contact info via a private tweet (called a "direct message" or DM for those of you not yet Twittified).  About an hour later, a woman from Time Warner called me.  Let me say that again: Time Warner called me.  She verified my information, and made me an appointment before we move out.  Just like that.


Case Study No. 2: Bank of America

All the drama going on with our mortgage bank approving, not approving, and hopefully someday re-approving the building in which we're buying an apartment has been another major source of stress lately.  As the messenger of the bad news, the mortgage broker I've been working with has gotten the brunt of my concerns as we've edged closer and closer to moving day without knowing where we're moving to.  He's been great, and trying very hard to keep me informed, but in the end, the decisions have been in the bank's hands.  The bank he's working with is Bank of America.  Frustrated, I again tweeted at an account of theirs that I found, @BofA_Help, more than anything as a vent for how distressing it is to be moving in five days with no clear destination.

Again, within minutes, Sharon from Bank of America tweeted back asking for my phone number.  She promised to call me herself the next day.  And she did.  Bank of America called me.  She listened to my story, took my information, and said she would do everything she could.  She called my mortgage broker directly to talk to him (he was surprised as well).  She then called the head of the condo mortgage department and talked to her directly.  She gathered all the information she could, and called me back a couple hours later to tell me everything she'd learned.

Unfortunately, there really was nothing she could do to help.  The head of the condo department explained to her the delays in approving the building, and there really is no way to make them go away.  But while Sharon couldn't solve my problem, she made me feel much better.  Suddenly, I wasn't a number on a spreadsheet.  I was a person whose concerns were brought directly to the department head.  Think about large corporations, especially customer-facing corporations, and think about how amazing that previous sentence is.

Conclusions

You can make the argument that these teams of folks dedicated to responding to tweets are a good PR move for the companies, and you'd be right.  Negative comments on Twitter are public, on view to everyone, and if the person tweeting is well-connected, can spread like wild fire.  Responding quickly to them generally elicits positive reaction tweets immediately thereafter.  Looks great for the company, big win.

But the customers win, too.  These Twitter teams, unlike any other customer-facing employees, seem to have the connections within the company to get results.  They can over-ride computer scheduling systems.  They can call department heads directly.  And they can do this within minutes to hours.  There's a psychological element as well.  The customer feels like a person, because a person responds to them.  But there's one thing above all else that is the biggest win for the customers:

With only 140 characters, there's no room for any bull.