How Thington gives every thing a voice
You know how it is — the car breaks down on the way to work. It’s cold and it’s wet and you’ve tried everything you know to get it working and now you’re out in the rain shouting, begging and pleading with it — “Why don’t you work? What’s wrong with you?!”
Or you buy a printer and you’re setting it up and it obstinately refuses to print. In a moment of total frustration you reach the inevitable conclusion: Your printer hates you! Your printer wants you to fail! The angrier you get with it, the more it just sits there, impassively.
And then people started connecting products to the Internet. All kinds of cool stuff became possible that hadn’t been possible before. Lights could be turned off automatically when they weren’t being used. Noisy washing machines could do their jobs when people were out, or when the electricity was cheap. A cheap webcam and motion detector could take the place of an expensive custom security system.
When we started playing with these devices, we really loved all the new things we could do with our homes, but we also noticed one other thing: we were talking to (and occasionally swearing at) our devices even more, because now they seemed even more inscrutable. They suddenly seemed to ‘decide’ to do something — like turn off out of the blue. And sometimes, for the life of us we couldn’t figure out why.
The more we looked at the interfaces and the software that people had built to manage these devices, the more we realized that they were doing them all wrong. When we were yelling at our devices, the thing we really wanted them to do was tell us what was wrong or why they did something. We wanted them to have a voice.
Maybe, we said to ourselves, our things should be able to talk back to us. Maybe they should explain why they did something. And if they needed more information, perhaps they could politely ask for it and then get on with their job. If they did something wrong, you could tell them and maybe they would do it right the next time.
This is why we made Thington, an app that enables a world of smart, communicating bots.
There are two kinds of bot on Thington. The first is a bot for each smart thing in your home or office. The bot for your webcam will say, “I saw something move in the living room when you were out, and I took a picture for you”. Your oven can tell you that it has finished warming up and is ready for you to start cooking. If I get into the office in the morning and all the lights are on, I can look at Thington where the lights will be telling me, “We are on because Tom switched us on yesterday at 5pm”. Of course not every message is super interesting, but Thington will summarize multiple updates where it can. The goal always is clear and polite transparency, so you can easily and quickly get a sense of what’s going on in your home.
As Clay Shirky said on Twitter when we announced Thington last week, “[They] made a tool for devices to talk to each other by actually talking to each other”. We think that sums it up nicely.
The second kind of bot on Thington is the Concierge. The Concierge is there to make sure that everything in your life is just the way you want it, and it does that by looking out for opportunities to create connections between devices. When it finds one, it’ll offer it to you.
For example, when you’re the last to leave the house in the morning it might send you a message: “I noticed you left some lights on in the house. Shall I switch those off for you?” When you install a new motion detector, it can ask you, “Shall I use this new motion detector to send you an alert when everyone is out, but there’s movement nearby?”
The Concierge can even take care of your houseguests. Using the phone’s GPS, it can see when your guests arrive at your home. It then welcomes them with a cheery message, gives them access to appropriate controls, and informs you of their arrival. When they leave again, the concierge clears everything up, taking away their access to your controls and waiting for the next opportunity to be helpful.
And of course everything is recorded in your stream in the Thington app.
(A quick aside: privacy is hugely important to us, so we don’t track the location of anyone’s phone on our servers. We use the iPhone’s “geofence” feature to ask the phone to send us a message when it arrives at specific, known locations.)
We think this bot-based Internet of Things has huge power, and its power comes precisely because it makes the interactions between things visible and understandable to humans, not just computers. Any device can tell you whats’s going on and why it just did that weird thing it did.
Our long-term goal is to make it easy for any thing to express itself. We’re working on Thington accounts for bike hire stations, public transit stops, weather stations, parking garages and all kinds of sensors everywhere, because the world doesn’t stop at your front door. All with the goal of making your life better.
In the meantime though, at least you’ll never have to swear at your thermostat again when it does something you didn’t expect. Because now it can explain itself — and when you can hear what it’s saying we think you’ll find it was just trying to do its best!
If you’re interested in trying out Thington, go to https://thington.com to find out more and download the app. If you have any questions or comments, ping us on our Twitter account @thingtonhq or e-mail us at hi@thington.com and we’ll do everything we can to help you out. There’s a list of Frequently-Asked Questions on the Thington website too: Frequently Asked Questions.
If you’re a manufacturer or potential partner and you’re interested in Thington integration or want to find out more about what we’re doing, then e-mail us at hi@thington.com.
If you’re a member of the press and would like to talk to us then e-mail us at press@thington.com — there are also some resources for you available at https://thington.com/press
