Google Home now Handles Three Requests at Once

Assistants getting more capabilities to multitask.  Another step towards more complex conversations and dialog.    How much will this be used?  Looking towards more conversational memory and context awareness.

Google Home now handles three requests at the same time
Multitask with your voice.

By Jon Fingas, @jonfingas in Engadget

Google Home speakers can already perform two commands at the same time. But what if you live in a particularly connected household, where you may need to juggle more tasks? The company has an answer: support three simultaneous requests. So long as you form full queries with "and" in between, you can multitask like a pro using only the spoken word. This could be particularly helpful if you want to turn on the lights, increase the temperature and play some tunes without having a Routine in place.

The feature is only available in predominantly English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, the UK and the US) at the moment. Google told TechCrunch it's looking "forward" to supporting more languages, but there's nothing more it can say.  ... " 

Virtual Assistants and Multitasking

Thoughtful piece, needs to be considered in conversational dialog.

The Real Problem with Voice Assistants like Siri is your Brain    By Robbie Gonzalez in Wired

 " .... Interacting with a conversational interface might tempt you to do other things simultaneously, but just because your eyes are free doesn't mean your brain is. "Yes, you're doing other things at the same time, but there's a cost to that," Pashler says. A conversational interface spreads that cost out over time. "It’s competing for little moments of time, ideally when you have adequate free resources, but it will also gobble up resources when you need them for something else. And at times like that, it will probably diminish the thoughtfulness with which you do those other things."  .... '

Achieving a Flow State

Examined the ideas of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's  'Flow' way back. And now read a piece in medium by John Boitnott that points to work saying that multitasking is killing our brains.   Gives some ideas about achieving it.   Yes, need that protection with new devices popping up every day.  Also see the post on the 'Flow Game' tag below.

More Google Micro Moments

Continue to be interested in how tasks are done as part of a larger job.  How about Mid task corrections?   ThinkWithGoogle writes:  " ...  91% of Smartphone users will turn to their phones for ideas in the middle of a task ... " .   Mixes with some of Google's writings on micro moments.   How are tasks assembled to produce value.    How then is a virtual assistant to insert itself into the process of a job?  As what kind of resource?

MIT Research on Randomizing Tasks

I worked on a project that looked at how job tasks could be randomized in industrial processes.  This research effort at MIT, fairly technical, looks at a more arcane area of massive multicore processors, but still touches on how you can use context knowledge to randomly direct attention.   Could this be used for human task attention?

High Cost of Human Multitasking

In GigaOM:  A look at some surveys on the effects of multitasking.  We all do it today, but to what extent.  A closer look at the value of focus is important. " .... We are increasingly distracted at work due to frequent electronic notifications and an overwhelming temptation to multitask, especially during meetings. Research reveals there is a high cost to personal and organizational performance. Companies need to provide strategies and tools to improve employee focus and engagement.. " .  The WP article on this topic is interesting.

Multitasking Influencing the Brain

In Fast Company:  On multitasking.  Our shiny new devices allow us to do this creatively, all the time.  There has been debate about how ultimately this effects our productivity and lives.  Here new findings in this area.  Tough talk.  By  Stanford researcher whose work we used:  Clifford Nass: (I see he has a new book out: The Man Who Lied to his Laptop, exploring)

  " ...  As Nass told NPR, if you think you're good at multitasking, you aren't:

. . . We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.
They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And . . . they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks. ... " 

Mobile Consumer Behavior Visualized Simply

From POPAI:  An infographic that Googe developed to illustrate mobile consumer behavior.   The piece is low information, easy on your eyes, they say.  Saving us from deep thoughts.  With conclusions like: "  ... Not only are consumers more mobile than ever, but they’re multitasking more as well. Is anyone else shocked that 86% of people use their phones while consuming other media? ... " 

Changing Cognition in Kids

Interesting piece in the Atlantic.  Regarding a Pew report:  " ... The survey found, overall, what many others already have: that neuroplasticity is, indeed, a thing; that multitasking is, indeed, the new norm; that hyperconnectivity may be leading to a lack of patience and concentration; and that an "always on" ethos may be encouraging a culture of expectation and instant gratification.... "  

Gaming and the Science of Expertise

In the SciAM Blog: How a game is being used to study the science of the development of expertise.  Collaboration, multitasking and goal achievement.

Controlling Swarms of Tiny Robots

From IEEE Spctrum: We proposed a variant of this idea years ago.  Unleash a hoard of tiny robotic 'turtles' in a confined space like a warehouse to take inventory, use sensors to sniff out problems,  track individual items for confirmation of movement, etc.   Each robot would be tiny,  simple, multitasking and completely disposable (oops, that was a forklift).  Information would be transmitted to a central computer and organized by a central AI.  Too expensive then, but now the technology has caught up to a degree. Send them forth ...

Sherry Turkle on the Death of the Phone

Currently reading Sherry Turkle's book, mentioned below:

A podcast from HBR IdeaCast: Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone

Featured Guest: Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

The Moving Value of an Impression

Good recent piece in AdAge Digital.  As I sit in a restaurant watching a number of people heads-down on smartphones. The attention budget we have is clearly now somewhere new, has changed remarkably and it is mobile.

How Social Media Stole Your Mind, Took Advertising With It
And Now, a Tweet From Your Sponsor: With Multitasking Stretching Cognitive Capacity, Are Messages That Drive Marketing Meaningless? The impression is the basic unit of attention that has been sold by media and bought by advertisers for more than 50 years. But in the past decade, something has happened to it; it's not just newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and the web. It's infiltrated every waking moment of our lives through social networks and devices, competing for every last scrap of our cognitive capacity. But we have none left, which is why the impression, and all the economies based on it, may be doomed .... 

Mapping Remarkable Relationships

Colleague Julie Anixter video on her new Youtube presence:

On Mapping Remarkable Relationships: Four Seasons
The essence of every great customer experience is a human experience, a relationship. Not with a brand or a company, but with the people that make it up. Sometimes that relationship is direct and face to face, sometimes it's indirect, sometimes virtual. Have relationships lost some of their currency and their value in the fast paced, over stimulated, multi-tasking, stressed out business world? I think so! This project begins to document, to map, some of the remarkable relationships I've experienced, with the hopes they may inspire ... "