Siri TV

Suddenly it clicks. What Steve Jobs had in mind for improving TV (as reported by the New York Times) and why he felt he could do something special with it. And as so often before, he was ahead of the curve.

There was a psychologist I once read about who studied behavioral patterns and was researching the tendency for human thinking to get stuck “on rails” and fail to innovate. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the psychologist, but I do remember clearly a story he told about a female interviewee. The psychologist was studying a woman while she was preparing a roast to be cooked in the oven. He observed her cut off a corner of the meat with kitchen scissors before placing it in the baking dish. 'Why did she do that?' he wondered, and quizzed her about it. But the woman didn’t know why. After thinking about it a bit she said it was just how she had been taught to do it by her mother.

The psychologist then went and interviewed the mother and asked about how she prepared the same meat dish. The mother talked through it and when asked why she had taught the daughter to cut the corner off the meat, she replied “I remember doing that. I often had to do that to get it to fit in the small baking dish I used to use.”

This story gives the perfect example of how we are creatures of habit. Once we learn a way of doing things, we tend to stick with it, often without questioning why. Steve Jobs was famous for his ability to buck these kinds of psychological blinkers. So when the fruit eating perfectionist, said to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, of TV "I've cracked it.” The rest of the TV industry would do well to sit-up and take note.

I have been skeptical Apple would release an Apple TV set (e.g. not just the little black box) but now I’m not. Primarily I was skeptical because Apple’s modus operandi is to deliver technology which meets and excels over the needs of the majority through judicious simplification. Whilst it has been clear to me for some time, TV’s have some dreadful “thinking on rails” design features (like the fact on many, you still have to cycle linearly through AV source after AV source, when changing AV source is now one of the most common operations I want to use the RC for), still they in the main, pretty simple devices – at least in day to day use. There is a degree of unnecessary complixity and I can certainly see how they can be improved. But I couldn’t see there was that much to frustrate with current TV solutions that the improvement would be in the “must have” category. There never seemed to me to be much opportunity for Apple to get their teeth into the problem and apply the 'less is more' philosophy they have so successfully employed for technologies with more complex use cases.

But now there is Siri and the answer has suddenly become, "because less can be so much more."

The biggest problem faced for years by the TV industry trying to deal with convergence has been how to reconcile lean / back versus lean forward modes of use. The TV is firmly what the industry refers to as a “lean-back” device, but all attempts to make it more connected / interactive / social have suffered because they entail less comfortable lean-forward mode of use. Things have improved greatly over the years, but still lean-back TV viewing sits uncomfortably with lean-forward style interaction. The connected TV has never quite managed to shake off a debilitating reputation for schizophrenia.

But that is about to change because now there is Siri. For those who have been hiding under a rock and don’t know what Siri is, it is a technology allowing natural language to control of a device and can also perform tasks. It is proving to be far more capable of understanding advanced grammar and natural ways of speaking than any other voice control solution.

Once more, just as the world is asking if they can possibly do it again, Apple are about to mainline a new category of device. The connected voice controlled information / entertainment system and it won’t have even one ounce of schizophrenia. Siri allows the user to talk naturally and ask for things using language as we already know it and use it.

Start to think about how voice control can be used with a TV and survey the impressive results Siri is already starting to bring iPhone 4S users and it soon becomes clear just how big this can be.

On the following matrix, I compare the kind of use-cases keyboard, button and touch interfaces are good for. Clearly this will be something of a subjective exercise, but I have tried to ensure I have been even handed in evaluating the relative strengths of each interface type for each kind of activity. The last column is something of an odd one out. In the last column, I estimate whether the Use-Case is a significant one in the context of the connected TV.



Look at the results. At first it looks like a fairly random spread. 1 = not well suited. 2 = middling. 3 = well suited. So clearly typing on a spreadsheet is less suited to voice control, a Remote Control or a touch device than it is to a keyboard and mouse. It is also not particularly well suited to a TV. Requesting the latest episode of a Podcast can be accomplished much quicker with a voice interface. “Siri, play me the latest episode of the Archers”, is likely to be far quicker than retrieving the latest episode by navigating a graphical interface with a remote control or mouse.

Here is the thing that really stands out for me with this table. For every use case I’ve thought of that is of higher relevance to the connected TV, voice control provides an as good or superior method of control than the others listed. The one exception here is gaming. But gaming apart, if Apple are implanting Siri technology in an upcoming TV as the New York Times suggests, it seems Jobs will indeed have cracked it.