Vaguely Disturbing, Yet Compelling : Liarcard
For those of you with significant others, I don’t recommend that you share this information. Not that I have anything to worry about.
I was lucky enough to catch the end of Teltech’s presentation at the Cluecon 2007 show in Chicago, and I heard about their new service called LiarCard. Essentially, Liarcard listens in on phone conversations, and detects if one of the parties is lying. Honestly. (Oh God, could this get bad, quick.) You arrange a call through Liarcard, and it records the conversation and then uses voice analysis to determine the probability of dishonesty during the call. You can even go back afterwards and tell which parts of the conversation were more dishonest than others.
Is it accurate? Well, according to them it is :
Essentially, if the quality of the voice is reasonably good and the operation and preparation is proper, the emotional analysis component will be almost 100% accurate. In this case, the technology will properly present how the tested subject is feeling in terms of emotional charge, cognitive conflicts and general stress (”Fight or Flight” syndrome). If the intention to deceive is genuine and this poses jeopardy on the tested subject, (assuming the tested party falls within the standard range of “sanity” or “normality”), then the Inaccuracy and Lie determination will also be accurate more than 90% of the time. (In the latest field research study conducted on 500 passengers in an airport, LVA -the security version of the technology- was able to render an overall accurate analysis in all 500 cases.)
Ok - I’m not sure if this is the most amazing service I’ve seen, or the most disturbing, but I’m sure that Liarcard could read my emotional response. Hmmmm… I see they also have a site called LoveDetect… I wonder what THAT’s about.
Anyways, I normally give out report cards for places like Liarcard, but I think I’ll choose my words carefully this time. I’m sure you understand.
Walter Mossberg on the Breakthrough iPhone
Walter Mossberg has spoken - the iPhone is a break through. As I was telling my Judo club last night, you had to somebody like Walter to get your hands on one. Check out his completely thorough review.
At the end, he mentions that the iPhone isn’t a good choice for somebody who needs a simple phone, but for those that need high end features, it’s a beautiful device. I think there’s another user who would benefit : the corporate worker who doesn’t need a ruggedized platform. The large iPhone screen and the simple integration with Web 2.0 applications make it the perfect mobile computing platform for many low-impact, yet mobile, jobs.
Cluecon 2007
Well, off I go to the ClueCon 2007 Conference. If you will be there, I will be speaking with John Hibel, VP of Marketing for Voxeo, at 1:30, and we’ll be describing the demonstration voice mashup I wrote using Voxeo’s Evolution Designer, Amazon EC2 and Ruby on Rails. If you can’t make it to the show, and still want to hear the demo, why don’t you give it a ring at (407) 982-5896? It’s not perfect, but I think it gets the point across.
If you want to see how I did the first part of the demonstration, I did up a quick screencast here. I’ll make it more formal after the show, and add in some Ruby and EC2 stuff. See you there!
June 26th - The Sound of Silence
No, William, it was very different when I was a kid.
You only had two choices when you wanted to listen to music. You could turn on your radio, or you could play your records. Radio was sort of fun, really, but where I lived, we only had three or four stations worth listening to. The people who ran the stations picked the songs they played, and they would run these commercials between the songs to pay for the station. Sometimes, on special days or nights, you could actually call into the station and request that they play a song, like “Don’t Fear the Reaper” or “Funkytown”. Of course, they wouldn’t play just any song, because maybe no one else would like it, and they would lose listeners, and they couldn’t charge so much for the commercials.
If you really liked a song, you could go to the store and buy it. I remember when I bought my first album - I played it all day for a month. AC-DC. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. I didn’t have anything else to play, actually, but that was OK. Most record stores were pretty small, and I bet they couldn’t hold a thousand records in them. No really, a thousand. That’s it. You see, the store keepers only carried albums that they could sell a lot of, and they didn’t have the space to keep the ones that wouldn’t sell quick. No, you couldn’t just go in and purchase any song you wanted. Well, they could order it for you, but that was a pain, and you had to know it existed before you could. I remember trying to sing the song for the guy behind the counter, and … Yes. I know. I can’t sing.
The Internet really helped. People started sharing their songs everywhere. They used to have this site called Napster that people would use to tell other people what songs they had on their computers, so that others could listen to it too. Really easy, sort of what iTunes is like. You searched for the music you liked, and you downloaded it. What happened? Well, there was this group of people called the RIAA that thought that they owned music - all music. You see, they made Napster shut down because a lot of the music that was shared was under copyright, and RIAA were the people who represented all the record companies. They asked the court to make Napster stop, and the court did. No, not all the music was copyrighted. Yes, people made the point that the RIAA had no business in telling people they couldn’t share music that they owned themselves. Yeah - it was stupid. The judge must have been low on his medication or something. You know that the ends don’t justify the means, right?
What happened? Well, soon after the whole Napster thing, a bunch of new companies came on the scene and started doing some really good stuff. iTunes started, and there were others, but people could purchase music on the Internet whenever they wanted - just like today. Radio stations started putting their music on the Internet too, so that you could choose between thousands of stations. It was an excellent time to love music. Except for one day.
The big corporations were still afraid of the Internet. They were afraid of all these Internet radio stations - I’m not quite sure why. So, they came up with this plan to charge the Internet radio stations so much money to use their music, that they couldn’t stay in business. Yeah - pretty short sighted. So, on June 26th, 2007, all the radio stations shut down for an hour in protest. Yup, all of them. They wanted to get people to pay attention to what was happening to them. Sort of worked, too.
Well, you know the rest. Like everything else, people like their freedom, and a thousand record company executives simply can’t defeat hundreds of millions of music fans. It sort of sucked for a while, but it’s all good now. Hey, have you ever heard Howlin’ Wolf? Search for “Built for Comfort”. It’s a riot.
Drug Trials and Voice Mashups
According to BCC Research, spending on clinical trials in the United States was almost $24 billion dollars in 2005. According to Microsoft:
Pharmaceutical companies can spend 12 to 15 years and up to $900 million to bring a drug to market. About 45 percent of this cost is accrued during the clinical trial phase. Additionally, studies indicate that 75 percent of all trials conducted in the United States are behind schedule by one to six months. Because improving time-to-market for new drugs is critical for pharmaceutical companies, managing the clinical trial process is one of the most significant areas of opportunity for improvement.
Critical to the success of any trial is the consistent, streamlined and reliable collection of patient data. Exacerbating the problem are logistics, for most trials involve hundreds and thousands of medical personnel and patients. Pharmaceutical companies must leverage technology to help teams communicate and to collect patient data not only for cost reasons, but quality as well.
I believe that this problem begs for a solution based on programmable web technologies. Using the phone as a input device, patients involved in the trial can give consistent feedback that is instantly available to researchers. Using the web as a platform allows for simple and reliable integration with existing equipment in the phamaceutical vendor’s systems, especially when issues such as geography or inter-company communication are involved. Using technologies such as Voice XML and Ruby on Rails, reliable and scalable systems may be custom designed to collect data from patients in very rich ways, decreasing the time to analyze results from trials, speeding time to market, while lowering costs.
A real life example of Vonage’s Voice Mail to Text
One of my most favorite. Boy match ups and I’ve seen lately is the new bondage text feature that automatically converts my voice mails in to taxed and then important to me as an email I think this is really kinda cool. Because then I can save them in my email inbox and search for them. And I’m always trying to search for things which I her emails I’m sorry I’m sorry we’re smells so anyways this is an example of what it looks like when it comes into my in the in box that also include the way if out here she could see how accurate it was. so anyways. See
p.s. Evidence of how poorly I speak? You tell me.
Alec Saunders from Enterprise 2.0
Alec just got back from the Enterprise 2.0 show, and has an excellent post about social networks in the Enterprise space. What I found fascinating is how employees are bringing their services, in particular their communcations services, with them in the business. I think it has some pretty major implications for Enterprise IT managers, if not the larger organization. You should read it, if you have a minute. Oh, and know you know what I was doing while I was watching Will play little league.
iPhoney Simulator
Chopi, the Thomas Howe Company designer, caught this link today of an iPhone UI simulator. Steve Jobs has announced that the API for the iPhone will be Safari (after bashing the browser as an interface just a few weeks earlier). As I wrote about earlier in the Jaduka post this morning, you can do some pretty neat things with phone/web integration, but my suspicion will be that the choice of Safari will be initially limiting.
How limiting? Well, now you can know. The iPhone UI simulator will show you exactly what you can do with the iPhone, on your OS X laptop. Funtionality includes :
- Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
- Open any website that works with Safari.
- Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation
- Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
- Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
So, how does it look? I checked out some Telephony 2.0 sites to see how they fared….
Telephony API of the Week : Jaduka
Jaduka is a web services company aimed at allowing Mashup developers to trigger phone calls from web applications. Essentially, if you want to deploy a button on a web site, so that customers can click and call you or your business, Jaduka has a great offering. I put mine together in about five minutes; you can too. I picked the button I liked the best from their copious gallery, and off it goes. It’s working, and I’ve pointed it at my Grand Central account, if you want to try it. I picked the button below, as I bet Jon Arnold will call me and I don’t want to have him dive for his headset again :
Jaduka also provides an API, which has two basic parts. The first manages calls, either calls to the account holder’s phone number, or calls between two arbitrary numbers. The second part of the API manages voice mails, so that you can manage them as wave files. As an example of the call management solution, you easily bridge calls between two numbers whenever it makes sense. Let’s say you have a scheduled call with a partner. You could make an application that calls you when the appointment starts, then calls your partner. You can also make that functionality point to different places, so that you can implement a find-me, follow-me system, or a skills based routing engine. As an example of the voice mail management solution, you could take your Jaduka account and aggregate reports from remote salesmen by having them call into your number, then taking those voice mails as WAV files and attaching them to your CRM system.
Finally, let me say that whoever is doing product management at Jaduka is doing a great job, because the Jaduka API is small, easy to learn, and provides real value. I didn’t have to spend more than fifteen minutes to read the documentation before I felt like I grokked it. Definitely part of my toolbox going forward.
Gaboogie
Gaboogie is a pretty cool idea. How often, in your professional life, do you find yourself trying to setup a conference call? Gaboogie aims to make that easier for you, in classic 37 Signals fashion. Gaboogie’s service makes it easy to setup a conference call between a small number of participants, and then when the time comes for the conference, dials everyone on the list. It keeps dialing until it gets you, and if you miss the call, you simply call back the number that you missed. Add a dash of modern design, a few nice features like call recording, and presto - you’ve got gaboogie. Gaboogie has a simple, volume based pricing structure, going from around 12 cents a minute down to 2.
I know that I rail about horizontal services all the time, and frankly, I think that gaboogie will have the same issues as well. It will suffer from the twin challenges of customer education (most people won’t know it exists) and customer habituation (people have to change their habits to use it). In my book, the saving grace is the Internet’s long tail effect, which would be since the cost of incremental delivery is nearly zero, there may be enough scattered demand to make a decent business for them. I hope so, as I think this is a real problem that begs for a simple solution.
How does it stack up?
- Technically, my first impressions are a B+. I love the simple design, and I caught wind from a job posting that they are using Freeswitch in their network. (Rock on with that one). The mapping of functionality is sparse, and I hope it stays that way, as it eases customer education. As a rapidly aging telecom geek, I have the suspicion that ease of use will be dashed upon the corporate IVRs that will inevitably be in the call flow. The fact they give you a dial in number will really help here, but I gotta think that it will be a jarring experience for those involved. No API yet, or I would be mashing it up with 30 boxes this morning.
- From a business perspective, a solid B. Getting conference calls started on time is a real problem, and they have the basic right solution for it. In time, I’m sure it will be an excellent solution. I have a marketing issue though, as I believe that they have a consumer company name for what is essentially a business offering. (I’m not the only one with the opinion.) It won’t be that difficult to reproduce the service today, but there’s opportunities to create community and hard to replicate data with time - I hope they exploit that.
- Buzz, another B. They have today’s look and feel, a sense for the problem, and a decent approach to solving it. They certainly aren’t leading the charge, but they are solidly in the pack.