A demi-pivot and a first major gotcha
Lots of fun at the start of the week seeing more designs emerge from Bern. I really appreciate his willingness to allow me into the design process. Screen-by-screen and tweak-by-tweak he’s sharing work-in-progress through Slack or Invision. His enthusiasm for the project is evident in the work and I’m delighted with where he’s got to in a short time. The only problem is it’s impossible for me not to get distracted and drawn into conversation — it certainly doesn’t boost productivity.
And the pivot? Well, in reviewing Bern’s work it got me thinking about the onboarding/setup process and the need to integrate with a number of third party apps. It occurred to me that it may be better to have the Race.Radio channel operate as a voice assistant, delivering information or enabling actions as required. This means that pushing and holding the button only ever has one function: to allow the user to talk to someone (or something). It also makes channel management easier as a single channel can cover multiple functions.
As well as simplifying the interface for the user, it also simplifies the design and development tasks within the app. The Race.Radio assistant (or coach, or controller?) can be continually enhanced as it learns through AI what users are trying to achieve, and as we add more capabilities. Obviously this means placing a bet on voice interfaces becoming more accepted over time, but that seems inevitable doesn’t it? Particularly in scenarios — in a car, on a bike — where there’s no alternative.
As a result of this mini-epiphany, I lost/gained an evening having way too much fun playing about with Dialogflow, a very cool tool from Google that enables you to create conversational interfaces, powered by AI (their words, I’d say machine learning). It’s even possible to design your own voice by choosing the gender, pitch and intonation. Genius.
Even more time was consumed the following morning when I discovered the Google Assistant Investor Fund and the Alexa Fund. The former seems particularly appropriate — pretty sure I tick/check all the boxes.
If your company is developing technologies that broaden the Assistant’s set of features, building new hardware devices for digital assistants, or focusing on a particular industry such as travel, games, or hospitality, we’d like to hear from you.
I’d like to get a little further down the line with development before giving my idea away through an online application form. Although I guess Google knows everything already. And Alexa would have been listening when I discussed the idea with my wife over dinner.
Gotcha
It’s not like my world fell apart, but my stomach gave a distinct lurch when I got this note back from a prospective adviser/investor.
This looks like a great idea, however it requires wearing headphones? It’s illegal in certain European countries — France is one of them — and some American states to cycle whilst wearing headphones. How do you combat this?
Yikes. Now this didn’t come as a complete surprise. I’d identified this risk in my presentation: not just the legislative threat, but also the perception of safety risks among riders and the antipathy headphone-wearing might create among car drivers too. However what I hadn’t done is properly research which countries had actually banned headphone use — so dumb with hindsight.
There’s bad news and good news. The bad news: the countries include France, Spain and Italy — big cycling markets (though not in my sales projections for Y1/2). The good news: the US states are Florida and Rhode Island, with California, New York, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware allowing cyclists to use a single earbud. My gut is these laws would have been enacted as a reaction to people wearing over-the-ear headphones in busy cities, but regardless, I don’t want to have any unnecessary injuries or deaths on my conscience, so I do feel it’s imperative I do all I can to encourage and enable safe usage.
To that end, I’d already briefed Matthew to sketch some concepts for a single-sided, bone conduction earpiece that would leave the ear open to traffic noise and the general surroundings, together with a muffler for the mic to reduce wind noise. I should be able to share some initial ideas next week.
Speaking of which, a slew of technical documentation from Michael to review next week, as well as two meetings with potential investors. Fingers crossed it’s a good one.
Over and out.
