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Siri: a glimpse of the future

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

Last week, I picked up an iPhone 4s and got a chance to try out its premiere feature, Siri. Siri is a digital assistant that lets you talk to your phone to get things done. You can turn the phone on, bring it up to your ear, and ask Siri for driving directions, to add reminders, find restaurants, play music, schedule meetings and more.

When I first heard about this, like many others, I wasn't impressed. Why would I want to talk to a phone? The UI on an iPhone is efficient and, as a techie, I'm pretty good at using it. Even though we've seen it predicted in all sorts of Sci-Fi movies, from Scotty in Star Trek to Dr. Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was still not sure why talking would be preferable over other interfaces.

After using Siri for a week, I get it. Siri is a glimpse of the future.

In this post, I'll tell you why that's a very good thing.

It's not voice recognition

First, let's get something out of the way: Siri is not just voice recognition. Voice recognition by itself is nothing new and has been available for a while, even on phones. The important thing to understand is that voice recognition is merely the first step of what Siri does. It's what happens after your voice has been transcribed that's new and exciting.

Siri does a remarkably good job of natural language processing. In other words, it actually tries to understand human speech.

Before Siri, almost all voice recognition systems only worked if you used a very specific set of keywords and phrases - incantations, really. With Siri, you can speak more or less naturally and it (she?) does a remarkable job of understanding you. You don't need to read a manual or cheat sheet to use Siri: just start talking and you'd be amazed at how it seems to just work. It's certainly Clarke's third law at play, but at times, Siri seems truly magical.

Context

Not only does Siri understand normal human speech, it's also aware of the context around the conversation. For example, Siri is aware of both your location and where you live, so you can say:

"Remind me to water the plants when I get home"

As you pull into your driveway, the reminder will go off. Or, you can try:

"Do I need an umbrella this weekend?"

And Siri will check the forecast in your area, see that it's 70 and sunny, and say "no". Siri also remembers the previous things you've said, so you can have a whole conversation with your phone:

"What pizza places are around here?"
"I found a number of pizza restaurants fairly close to you." (a list comes up with Yelp reviews)
"What about burgers?"
"I found 20 burger restaurants fairly close to you." (another list from Yelp)
"What's the best one?"
"I found 20 burger restaurants fairly close to you. I've sorted them by rating."

Natural language processing + context + apps = some amazing possibilities that go far beyond the "voice recognition" you've seen before.

Efficiency

At first, I thought Siri would only be useful when my hands are busy, such as while driving and never expected to talk to my phone otherwise. As it turns out, talking to Siri can be a huge time saver in all situations. For example, imagine I want to set an alarm that will go off at 9am every weekday. Here are my two options:

Option 1: touchscreen UI

Push the power button
Slide to unlock
Swipe through app screens to the clock app and tap to open it
Tap the alarms tab
Click the plus (+) to create a new alarm
Use the spinners to set the time to 9am
Tap the repeat menu
Tap each of the weekdays individually
Tap save
Done.

Option 2: Siri

Push the power button
Hold the phone up to my ear and say "wake me up at 9am every weekday"
Done.

We're talking an order of magnitude faster. Similar time savings can be observed when getting directions ("how do I get home?"), scheduling meetings ("setup a meeting with Jon for 9am tomorrow about mobile strategy") and many other tasks. The ability to skip dozens of menus and huge amounts of text entry is a huge boost in efficiency.

And here's the kicker: the iPhone touchscreen UI is built incredibly well. It's arguably one of the most intuitive and efficient UI's available. Despite that, it's still orders of magnitude slower than Siri.

Accessibility

Speed and efficiency are great, but accessibility is why Siri is truly a glimpse of the future. Although the iPhone touchscreen UI is intuitive and beautiful, it's still something that must be explored, experimented with, and learned. I'm a "power user", so I find it easy; the average person, even with a best-of-class interface, will find it harder.

The beauty of Siri is that it makes all of the functionality of a high tech smartphone available to everyone. Even the least tech savvy person knows how to talk, give commands, and ask questions. As Siri progresses, the bar for using the state-of-the-art will get lower and lower.

And after all, wasn't that always Steve Jobs' goal? Wasn't he always striving towards technology that was accessible to anyone, with no training and no confusion? Siri is a small step in that direction: pick up your phone and, in plain English, tell it what you want.

Personality

Finally, Siri has a personality. She can even be a bit cheeky.

There's an entire site dedicated to Siri's clever responses. But these are more than just easter eggs. They bring Siri - and your iPhone - to life. The iPhone has always done spectacularly well in terms of customer satisfaction; giving the phone a personality will make people love it. Siri will become assistant, friend, and even a part of you - we are cyborgs, after all. I suspect that after Siri, you'll never be able to go back to a phone without it.

Just the beginning

Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Siri is just the very first step. Actually, that's not entirely accurate: Siri is yet another step in a long continuum of making computers ever more accessible. From punch cards, to the command line, to the mouse & keyboard, to touch screens, and now, natural language processing. There is still a great deal of work to do, but give Siri a try now to see where things are headed.

In the near future, I expect Siri to be integrated with countless more apps. For example, I'd love to see Shazaam ("what song is this?"), New York Times ("what's happening in the world?"), shopping apps ("is this a good deal?"), and social networking apps ("who is this guy?"). I wouldn't be surprised to see some element of "learning" added as well, allowing Siri to become more personalized by using more info about you and your contacts (e.g. via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn integration), getting better with accents and mannerisms of speaking, remembering previous conversations you've had and... who knows what else.

I survived the 30 day blog fitness challenge

On July 7, Adam Nash, Mario Sundar and I started the 30 day blog fitness challenge. Today, I write my 30th blog post. For those of you keeping score at home, today is actually August 9th, so it took slightly longer than 30 days. Oh well, I'm just happy I made it.

To get here, I wrote about how much I suck at programming, the apocalypse, pulling all-nighters hacking, and doppelgängers. Occasionally, I resorted to posts that were almost entirely travel photos; at other times, I down right cheated. After one month, I managed to nearly double the number of posts in my 4 year old blog.

Let's take a look at the impact this had.

Traffic spike

Not many people read my blog. Or at least, they didn't, until shortly after this blog fitness challenge started on July 7. Since then, I've had far more traffic than usual; the absolute numbers are still nothing impressive, but it's a ~10x improvement over just about all previous months. I've only seen spikes in traffic like this twice: the most recent was from the "This is where I work" post, thanks to Jeff Weiner and other LinkedIn folks sharing it all over the place. As popular as that post was, it's only #2 all time. Can anyone guess what's #1?

Who's reading this stuff?

No surprises there: hello co-workers at LinkedIn! Thanks for stopping by. I must say that not only are you all good looking, but you also have great taste, both in blogs and in browsers. Seeing Internet Explorer at less than 9% of traffic makes me very happy. In fact, mobile traffic to my blog beats IE by 3%. Sweet!

Blog driven development

When you know you have to write a blog post every night, you start seeing the world a little differently. Every time I had an interesting thought, read a fascinating article or learned something new, I'd wonder if I could blog about it. Of course, being obsessed with lists, I'd write each of these ideas down in a Google Doc. The list is to 64 items now, half of which I wrote about in the last month and half of which are left over for future blogging.

One of the interesting results from this sort of thinking is what Adam described as "blog driven development". That is, when you start working on a new project, try to image out what the blog post will look like from day one. What will the title be? What are the 3-5 major points you'll highlight? What screenshots or media will you include? Working through these issues right up front is a powerful way to identify what's truly important for your project and can make it easier to prioritize and make good trade-offs.

Communication skillz

You know that whole communication thing they told you about in college? Turns out it really does matter. You see, software engineering involves far more than just writing code (although writing clean code is all about communicating your intent to other programmers). I spend a lot of my time at work discussing and debating ideas with co-workers, writing emails, IMing, filing bug reports, creating wiki pages, writing documentation, and putting together presentations. I've also become the editor for the LinkedIn Engineering Blog, which means I not only write my own entries, I also help other people write theirs.

The 30 day blog challenge proved to be a wonderful training ground for this role. Knowing I had to write an entry every night, regardless of how crazy my schedule was, taught me to write quickly, edit mercilessly, and just get things done. I've still got plenty to learn, but practice definitely makes perfect.

New discoveries, new code

One of the delights of having a public blog are the times when someone responds to your writing. There's a narcissistic component to it, but far more importantly, you often learn something from the replies. I got some great reading recommendations in one post, got in touch with several friends and co-workers who are interested in Crossfit from another post, and even had one of my project ideas that I hadn't had time to work on implemented for me as an open source project. How cool is that?

Time for a break

The 30 day blog fitness challenge was awesome. Kudos to Adam and Mario for suggesting it. Having said that, I'm pretty tired. I think it's time for a bit of a break to recharge and recover. But I'll be back soon. Got something you want me to write about? Let me know in the comments :)

Light reading for heavy lifting

In my previous post, I listed the best resources I've found for learning about diet and nutrition. In this post, I'll do the same for exercise and fitness.

While doing any exercise is better than none at all, not all routines are created equal. Chances are that the amount of time you have to dedicate to exercise is fairly limited, so it's essential to pick a routine that most efficiently meets your goals. As it turns out, optimal training very rarely consists of a light jogging and some situps, so if you actually want to see some results, spend a few hours up-front reading and learning.

When it comes to exercise, I'm completely self-taught. Just about everything I know - including powerlifting, olympic lifting, gymnastics, kettlebells, running, rowing, jump rope, programming, nutrition, strength, endurance, power, speed, etc - comes from these resources, so hopefully they will be helpful to others. Of course, I'm still learning, so if you know of other great resources, share them in the comments.

Starting Strength

Starting Strength

If you're going to set foot in a gym, this book is required reading. Do not pick up a dumbbell, do a situp, or look at a power rack until you read this thing cover to cover. Yes, it's worth the $30. Yes, the complementary DVD is worth it too. No, I don't make cent off of promoting this book.

I simply believe that this book, better than any other resource I've ever seen, manages to cover an enormous range of the most important topics in exercise: adaptation, functional movements, why strength training is important for everyone (men, women, children, old people), the proper technique for all the major exercises, back and knee safety, a freakishly effective routine for beginners, diet, and a whole lot more. Whether you've never picked up a weight in your life or have been lifting for 15 years, I guarantee you will learn a lot and that this book will have a significant impact on how you train.

Some of the related resources you may want to look at are startingstrength.com (especially the awesome articles in the resources section) and the Starting Strength Wiki (especially the Wit and Wisdom of Mark Rippetoe for some laughs).

Crossfit

crossfit.com

If you really want to understand fitness, Crossfit is your go-to resource. Start with What is Fitness?, the article that'll make you re-think whether triathletes and ultra runners are really the "fittest" people on earth. Move onto the Foundations article and then Understanding Crossfit. If you still think bicep curls and 30 minutes on the elliptical is the most efficient way to reach your goals, then my blog probably isn't for you.

On the other hand, if you're intrigued, here are some other extremely useful resources provided by Crossfit:

Crossfit Exercises: videos and demos of just about every Crossfit exercise and workout.

Crossfit Discussion Board: lots of great discussions about every topic and tons of helpful people willing to field your questions.

Crossfit FAQ: essential reading if you do Crossfit

The Crossfit Journal: articles discussing all things Crossfit, including exercise instruction, routines, equipment, nutrition and more. Well worth the $25/year.

Crossfit Football: Crossfit site tailored for football players, biasing the workouts for strength, power and speed.

Crossfit Endurance: Crossfit site tailored for endurance athletes, biasing the workouts for endurance and stamina.

SealFit: Crossfit site tailored for military (Navy SEAL) athletes, biasing the workouts for being a badass.

Stronglifts

http://stronglifts.com/

An awesome free online resource for all things strength. The 5x5 beginner routine is a good starting point (and very similar to the routine in Starting Strength). Follow up with the lifting tutorials and diet tutorials.

RossTraining

http://rosstraining.com/

Awesome site for fighters, general purpose strength & conditioning, and DIY/minimalist training. Check out Burpee Conditioning, Strength Training for Fighters, The Home Gym, and Budget Training.

Beast Skills

http://www.beastskills.com/

Great tutorials and progressions for all sorts of bodyweight feats, including one arm pull-ups, muscle-ups, and the human flag.

Olympic Weightlifting

Olympic Weightlifting: a Complete Guide for Athletes and Coaches

Decent guide to the how and why of olympic weightlifting. Very useful if your routine includes lots of cleans, jerks and snatches. Even more useful if your routine doesn't include them so you know what you're missing. Though not quite as comprehensive and generally useful as Starting Strength, it's a useful resource. Moreover, Everett's gym, Catalyst Athletics, has a good listing of daily workouts, exercise videos, and articles.

Drills and Skills

http://www.drillsandskills.com/

Tutorials for every type of gymnastics movement, including rings, floor skills and stretching.

POSE

http://posetech.com/

If you want to learn to run correctly and especially if you run barefoot or in minimalist shoes, you should check out the POSE technique of running. The Crossfit Journal and Crossfit Endurance also have lots of useful running tutorials.

ExRx

http://www.exrx.net/

A good collection of info on exercise, including a thorough exercise and muscle directory, beginners guides, and FAQ.

Stack Exchange Fitness and Nutrition

http://fitness.stackexchange.com/

You're probably more familiar with StackOverflow, but the Stack Exchange sites cover a broad range of topics, including a great forum for asking questions about fitness and nutrition.

Dragon Door

http://www.dragondoor.com/

Although the site gets more and more commercialized every day, the articles section is still useful for tutorials on bodyweight and kettlebell training.

Resources I don't recommend

There are a few resources you'll come across frequently that are best avoided. The two most common while searching online are bodybuilding.com and t-nation.com. I find that both of these sites are much more concerned with selling stuff than educating people and that the quality of the articles is very uneven. If you dig, you can uncover some gems in both those sites, but they are surrounded by a bunch of marketing gimmicks, bro-science, and utter garbage.

Other disseminators of misinformation include about.com's exercise section, Men's Health, and just about every single magazine you see at the gym/newstand and every product you see advertised on TV (BowFlex, Total Gym, p90x, etc). Again, it's not that these don't occasionally contain useful info or effective strategies, it's that you have to pick through so much garbage to get there that you're better off avoiding them entirely.

Some food for thought

Although I talk a lot about exercise, there is another component to being healthy that is worth discussing: diet. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you what to eat or what to avoid. It's not that I don't have opinions on this topic - if you know me, you're probably used to me butting in with my opinion on all topics - but rather that this kind of thing works best if you do the research and make up your own mind. To that end, I'm going to use this blog post to list some of the better resources I've found regarding food. If you're aware of other good ones, feel free to share them in the comments.

In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Those three phrases pretty much sum up the entire book. But you still might want to read it, as there is a bit of a back-story to it. Pollan's main argument is that (a) the absurd spike in obesity in the last several decades most likely comes form a change in our food supply, (b) food/nutrition science is a remarkably difficult field that has not produced any satisfying answers on exactly which changes are causing the problems and (c) until they get it figured out, we can rely on some common sense and reason to come up with a diet that is likely to be healthy. Pollan's discussion of the state of dietary research is eye opening: you will remember it the next time a "scientists discover that X causes obesity!" study pops up on the news.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivor'es Dilemma

Another Michael Pollan book that is a great resource for understanding the food supply. In this one, he goes through four meals: one that comes from industrial farming (fast food), one from an industrial organic farm, one from an "alternative/sustainable" organic farm, and one that he grows, forages and hunts himself. This book gives you a small glimpse into where your food really comes from, something most people don't take into consideration nearly enough.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Good Calories, Bad Calories

There are two key reasons to read this book: first, it thoroughly debunks the idea that dietary fat is bad for you. Or, to be more accurate, it simply shows how little evidence there was for the "eating fat makes you fat" hypothesis in the first place. Second, the book does a good job of discussing how not all calories are created equal. That is, calorie counting alone is not sufficient for maintaining a healthy diet. To be clear, Taubes isn't saying that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply, but rather that the way the body processes calories from different types of foods has a wide variety of hard to predict side effects. While the "carbohydrate hypothesis" Taubes proposes in this book is controversial - Taubes himself says a great deal of research is required to prove it - the book is important for recognizing that the type of food you eat is just as important as the quantity.

The rest

I've read a few other books on diet and nutrition, such as Enter the Zone, but in all honesty, I wouldn't recommend them. The majority of those books just feel like marketing gimmicks trying to sell the book and related products. Therefore, the rest of the resources I post are blogs, articles, online discussions, and studies I've come across that contain useful nuggets of information. As with everything else, take them with a grain of salt: their value is in providing the context for how to think about diet issues.

Blogs

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/

Lyle McDonald's blog that features tons of well regarded articles on diet and nutrition. I don't agree with everything he writes, but he has some real gems on there, such as The Energy Balance Equation, The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets, Carbohydrate and Fat Controversies, and Protein Controversies.

http://robbwolf.com/

A blog that focuses primarily on the paleo diet. I find paleo a little too hardcore, illogical and unrealistic for my tastes, but it works for many and Robb's blog has some good articles.

http://stronglifts.com/

Although the website is starting to look more and more like marketing material, it's actually one of the absolute best (and free) resources on the web for both strength training and diet. The How to Build Muscle and GOMAD articles are good starting points if you're trying to get bigger.

http://journal.crossfit.com/

The Crossfit Journal contains articles and videos about all things Crossfit: exercise instruction, competition videos, equipment guides, and, as is relevant to this blog post, nutrition articles. It's $25/year for a subscription, well worth it if you do Crossfit.

Random articles, studies and discussions

A bunch of useful links I've collected over the years. There are many others I've lost, so I may update this list over time as I find them.

Top Ten Fasting Myths Debunked: do you think that eating many small meals increases your metabolism? Do you believe that the body can only absorb 30g of protein per meal? Are you the one telling everyone to not eat after 8pm? Yea, should probably read this article.
The Calorie Delusion: Why Food Labels are Wrong: calorie counting is an imperfect science to begin with. Inaccurate food labels make this all the worse.
The Myth About Muscle and Metabolism: how many calories per day do you think a pound of muscle burns? Nope. You're not even close. Read the article.
Crossfit Nutrition Forum: Crossfit's messageboard is a good place to post questions on fitness and nutrition. Check out this epic thread I started long ago: Why bother with the Zone (or any other "name" diet)?
"A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics
The Science of Fat-Loss: Why a Calorie Isn’t Always a Calorie

Ikea furniture: some assembly required

I recently moved to a new apartment and had to buy a whole bunch of furniture, including a bed frame, bookshelf, dresser, and couch. I had to do the move in a bit of a hurry, so I did one rapid fire furniture shopping session at Ikea, taking advantage of their shipping policy: $59 for delivery within 30 miles regardless of how many items you bought and same-day delivery if you order by 2pm.

I had this grand vision of ordering furniture Friday morning and relaxing in it Friday night. Not being a seasoned furniture shopper, I forgot one very important detail: all Ikea furniture requires assembly. And lots of it.

It's not exactly hard, but it takes a lot of time and requires you to have the patience to read and understand Ikea's word-less manuals. That's right, the instructions don't include a single word: they are entirely composed of images and symbols, presumably to save on translation costs.

A typical page of Ikea instructions

Taking a page from the lego instruction manuals, the folks at Ikea generally do a pretty good job of visually conveying each step. Having said that, the graphics - especially the "best practices" images at the beginning of each instruction pamphlet - can be fairly amusing.

The "best practices" section on the first page of each instruction pamphlet

And occasionally, some of the images are downright incomprehensible. So, for those of you who've spent some quality time with "Billy", "Ektorp", and a hex wrench, here is some entertainment:

Worth watching: why are we happy?

No time for a full blog post today, so much like my last "worth watching" post, I'll leave you with another video that is well worth your time. In this one, Dan Gilbert asks, why are we happy?

In case you missed it: the epic 2011 Crossfit Games

A week ago, I listed 5 reasons why everyone should watch the Crossfit Games. I hope you listened, because what went down July 29 - 31 in Carson, CA was nothing short of spectacular. I was catching glimpses and recaps even while I was up all night at a hackday and watched all the final day's events live. I don't watch sports much these days - a topic for another blog post - but this was one of the best sporting events I've seen in a long time. If you missed it, here is a recap of some of my favorite moments.

Swimming, beach running

Crossfit is all about training for the "unknown and unknowable" and this year, they really meant it. Every kind of exercise was on the table. For the first time ever, we even got swimming. And not just any swimming, but ocean swimming in the very first workout. This Beach Workout also included running on soft sand, pull-ups, push-ups and squats. Not surprisingly, a Navy SEAL came in first on this event.

Softball, gymnastics

The first day continued with a skills test. This included an L sit hold for time, a handstand walk for distance and, my personal favorite, a softball throw for distance. In the past, Crossfit has taken flak for being too focused on pure work: how far can you run, how many reps can you crank out, how much weight can you lift. Testing these skill movements helps separate the true all-around athletes from the guys that are just workhorses.

Rope climbs, redemption

Day 1 concluded with a workout that included rope climbing and cleans. This is standard fare for Crossfit, but if you watched the Crossfit Games in 2010, you may remember Rich Froning Jr. losing his grip on 1st place when he couldn't climb the ropes in the final workout. After a full year to work on this weakness, he came back this year and absolutely crushed the rope climbs at the end of day 1 for some beautiful redemption.

Monkey bars, biking

The variety continued on day 2 with the Killer Kage workout. This combined front squats, riding a watt bike (another first for the games) and a 100 foot monkey bar course. You don't often get to see full grown men racing each other across monkey bars, but believe me, the ending of this video will have you on the edge of your seat.

Sled push, sled pull

The dog sled made a huge and unexpected presence in the final day of the Games. In the morning, the Dog-Sled workout required the athletes to push a ~450lb sled across the stadium. If seeing the Games' smallest male competitor, 150lb Chris Spealler, take this beast on doesn't get you out of your seat, nothing will.

The final workout of the day concluded with the athletes picking up a rope and doing a sled pull. It provided a wonderfully visual way of knowing who was in the lead. Pat Barber got the whole stadium to its feet when he managed to find just the right technique for it.

2nd place 2010, 1st place 2011

There is something beautiful and poetic in the 2010 Crossfit Games runners up becoming the 2011 Crossfit Games champions. Congrats to Rich Froning Jr. and Annie Thorisdottir, the two fittest people on the planet.

Up all night: the LinkedIn Intern Hackday, Day 2

Update: the official photos, videos, and submitted projects are now available on the Intern Hackday site.

In my previous post, I showed you the sights and sounds from day 1 of the LinkedIn Intern Hackday. This post will do the same for day 2, Saturday July 30. The Intern Hackday was an overnight affair and just about all the interns worked straight through the night to get their hacks done by noon. 45 projects were submitted, featuring a wide range of ideas, platforms and technologies. We saw games, music apps, UI frameworks, augmented reality, AI, location apps, IDE extensions, p2p file sharing, and even a 20 page report.

The pictures below are, as usual, mostly from iPhones. Keep your eyes on the Intern Hackday site for the official event photos, videos and project submissions soon!

12:00am: one of the interns turns 21!

2:30am: Dylan Field gives us a preview of his team's hack