Category Archives: It's About Time

We’re always thinking about time: your time saved, your time lost, how we can manage time-based media in a totally new way.

Mention in Speech Technology 2009

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on May 18, 2009 – 10:52 am
Filed under Future Communications, It's About Time

We were pleased to see an article by Moshe Yudkowsky in Speech Technology Magazine about the RebelVox solution. It’s fun to hear the product described as “riveting”.

In March, I went to the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco. There, a San Francisco-based voice communications platform vendor named RebelVox gave a riveting demonstration of a telephony interface that eliminates almost all of the overhead of making a telephone call. The company separates the act of sending your voice from making a connection, both of which are no longer bound in a rigid, linear time sequence. As a user, I select the name of the person I want to call from a list in what appears to be a standard instant messaging client. The application brings up a history of all of my calls and text and voice messages in typical IM format. I then touch the talk button and start to speak: My voice message transfers immediately to the person I’m calling.

1 conversation: 7 minutes to 1 minute. What did we lose?

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on April 15, 2009 – 4:54 pm
Filed under It's About Time

We have a video on our site that illustrates how RebelVox can work in the consumer or enterprise space. You get to feel how the messaging, live conversations, and the transition between those states actually works.

We estimate that the conversation shown, which includes leaving messages as well as a live conversation, would take about 7 minutes of the participant’s time to complete if they were using standard telelphony and voice mail. The participants, Sam and Jill, only speak for about 1 minute, which is about how long it takes to complete with RebelVox.

What’s missing?

  • Time waiting for a circuit to be created.
  • Time waiting for phones to ring.
  • Time waiting for someone to answer, or worst yet, not answer.
  • Time listening to voice mail prompts, only some of which come from your conversational partner. Most of them come unbidden from the carrier.
  • Time dialing into your voice mail to pick up messages—-and all of the above lost time.
  • Repeat ad infinitum.

Issues that contribute to the problem:

  • Most calls are not completed to their targets; a high percentage end up in voicemail. This is time-expensive for both the sender and receiver.
  • How long are most messages you leave? Many of them are very short. How does the overhead (waiting, ringing, prompts) measure up against the actual thing you need to say?
  • How many times a day does the average worker have to leave or pick up a message? Multiply that times how many people have voice mail?

This is not an insignificant piece of the gross national time bank—this is our precious time lost for no good purpose at all. The older generations seem so used to losing this time that they don’t even notice it. Younger generations, who have grown up with chat clients, not so much. They increasingly don’t use voicemail if they can help it. Unfortunately, they also give up on live voice, because, with this archaic model, it is so time consuming and far from the instant gratification they expect. Voice itself is actually quick and efficient, but the circuit switched technology overhead slows us down.

We think time savings is a good thing—and our goal is to generate a lot of it, for everyone.

The Tyranny of Live

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on February 9, 2009 – 10:29 am
Filed under Human Efficiency, It's About Time

“The tyranny of live” is a phrase we use around here to explain some of the archaic constraints surrounding the behaviors of phone calls and tactical radio communications.  In the “olden” days, communications were carried by a wire and the wire had to be in place between the communicators. Then things evolved so that the communications traveled over the airwaves, but the devices created the waveforms directly from live sound and converted the captured waveforms directly into sound. These physical behaviors created the sense, which some still accept, that voice conversations are a live media. Well, we don’t actually believe that, but we accept systems that still enforce this tyranny.

We all know that if you want to actually speak to someone now that the phone system has to find them, alert them, and capture their attention—that is, subject them to the tyranny of live, because that’s what you want to do. But did you realize that when you are leaving them a voice message that the system has the same behavior? It requires a “live” connection between you and the callee’s voice mail system (which doesn’t actually care that you are there at that moment)–with all the overhead that implies.

Of course, with today’s technology we don’t have to go straight from waveforms to sound or vice versa; we can digitize the data and do whatever we can imagine with it. We can save it; we can send it later; we can broadcast it, email it, transcribe it. (Most of us don’t do all these things with voice because it’s too much hassle to have 5 applications to replace our phones—even with all its limitations.)

The worse effect of accepting the tyranny of live is the fact that in tactical communications, the only messages you get are those that you can receive live, as in, real time now. Most of the radios send messages as they are spoken and transform the incoming messages directly into sound as they arrive. If there is any glitch in your real time network, a little bandwidth shortage, a piece of waveform disrupting hardware (an air conditioner, say), a bit of a hill, you never, ever receive that message. It is lost to you. And if no one repeats it at the right moment (how efficient is that?) you will not hear that message to get out of the building.

Things have to change for us to succeed in revolting against the tyranny of live, but it turns out that the technology is at hand in these days of IP networks and capable devices. And in the future your communications can happen when you want, and how you want, and you will spend as little “time” as possible making them effective.

Having it always work just the way you want is living with no tyranny at all.

It’s About Time

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on January 7, 2009 – 10:59 am
Filed under It's About Time

When it comes to communications, it turns out that time is a big issue. In fact, it’s not one issue but dozens of issues that all link back to a “concept” we think of as “time.” What we’ve discovered is that time isn’t exactly that one thing you think of, but is a flexible construct that implies a lot of different things. How you think about time and your work in time really makes a difference.

For example:

  • There is the “time” at which we speak. If we are together in space, we speak “now” to each other. If we are on a live call together, we are communicating “at the same time” or synchronously. If this mode of conversation is required, that is, if I need to talk to you “now”, then any system we use is required to put us into the same “time (but not space) continuum.” And there are certain behaviors and constraints (that’s the important point!) that a system has to support to create that “real-time feeling.”
  • There is the “time” which we can shift. That is, once we invented a way to store a communication, whether it is writing text or recording sound, we created a way to shift the time when someone receives a message from the time when someone creates a message. (This is what books and letters are all about.) Receiving letters in the mail, collecting email, or picking up voice mails are all ways of time-shifting our communications. These time shifted communications shouldn’t require the same constraints or controls as a “live” conversation, though for voice they mostly still do.
  • For phone calls, there is the time we invest (read “waste”) waiting for the call to connect to a person or, unfortunately, to someone’s voice mail (which also includes interminable prompts for things we never do like “Hit 5 to page this person”.) This “investment” is also incurred when we pick up our messages. Twice paid.
  • Also for calls, there is the time we loose when we are interrupted from our concentration by things that beep or ring demanding our attention “right now”.

It turns out that the time we use, the time we shift, the time we lose are, with enough thinking and design,  malleable to the power of modern technology. But antithetically, we live with a lot of old, ingrained assumptions about how our communications can work and they limit our ability to find new and creative solutions.

For example, if you try to explain to a long-time phone user (usually read “older person”) that he shouldn’t have to wait for a phone to ring on the other side of the country in order to leave a message, he would look at you with perplexity. “How could that even be?” But if you told a 15 year old texting teenager, that he would have to wait for his friend to come online before he he could type a message, he would also look at you with perplexity. “The heck with that!” One reason that the younger generation prefers texting to voicing is that texting is free from time constraints: no waiting to text, no ringing, no matter if the other person is paying attention right now. Email has similar properties and it works even if the network is not available “right now”.

So time is of the essence. Your time. My time. Flexible time.

-Mary

User Experience Driven by Technology, or the other Way ‘Round?

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on December 15, 2008 – 8:14 am
Filed under Future Communications, Human Efficiency, It's About Time

Lee Dryburgh, founder of the EComm Conference, makes some interesting points about the future of telephone calls. He points out that it is not in the operator’s interest to enable true efficiency for users of telephones—operators bill by the minute—people save time by the minute. Two contrary intentions. From his recent blog:

Operators have very little incentive to start respecting people’s time and attention. Yet there is ever-greater pressure for people’s time and attention – it’s the new scarcity. Operators are not likely to strive for successful communications anytime soon; i.e. five 9’s of fulfilling intention rather than electrical circuit availability. Their legacy binds them to the notion that connectivity is the scarcity not human time and attention. Their business model is one of charging according to time (minutes) spent using the network. Efficiency in most cases would mean less minutes.

From our point of view, it is not only the operators that impede the efficiency of phones. We have deep rooted assumptions about what a phone call is—and those assumptions drive the basic core entity (a live call originally connected by a solid piece of copper) on which telephony and, more importantly, the telephone application is built. It is not enough to bypass the traditional phone carriers. Many VoIP applications have accomplished that, but even with VoIP the primary call experience is still the same.

We feel it is primary that both the sender’s and receiver’s efficiency are optimized—you can speak to whomever you want whenever you want. You can listen whenever you want to whomever you want. Each should have perfect control. And there should be no overhead time lost and no unwanted interruptions. This takes more than bypassing the operators and going to IP. It requires a pervasive rethinking of how to meet those goals in an entirely new way. But you can’t get there until you design the optimal user experience. This requires you to adopt a new set of constraints with which we are required to optimize the technology to meet the goals of users—instead of the traditional other way ’round where users are still required to behave in ways dictated originally by century old technology.

-Mary