For a time, this website carried the tagline “Living in La La Land”.   And… I should add, It has nothing to do with the movie. The expression “Living in La La Land” has been around for a lot longer than that.   It’s a way of saying, “You know… you might want to consider these couple of things,” or… “You know you’re bat-shit crazy, right?”

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of spoken word interfaces for… quite awhile now.  Building them, playing with them, using them, tweaking them, throwing them out.   I learned the word “munge”.   We’re still waiting for spoken word interfaces to come of age.  Think of how disappointing is Siri, and all of her clones.  And if you’d told me several years ago that people would buy “always listening” devices to place in their homes with… informed consent…?  But they do.

And why should I want to join that parade?   But I did….  And… the results were not spectacular.  But wait….

Initially, my objective was to build some mobile application functions suitable for a small business – a lot of functions constructed not so deep, but connected and organized in a rough and ready way.  Initially, I did this on the Force.com platform.  For those of you who don’t know… this is the programmatic undergirding of Salesforce.  I was playing with Salesforce 1, which was in its infancy.  I found the experience mostly unsatisfactory, mostly because I had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted my functions to behave, out there in the real world, and SF1 would not do… what I wanted it to do.  Not everything.  And I’m greedy that way.   What I wanted was an efficient way to collect, organize and store data.  Key word being “organize”.  It is possible, for instance, to collect and store information using the notes features on phones.  And you can use speech-to-text to do that.  I do this.  You do this.  I still do this.  But then you end up with information that is poorly-organized, and information which, supposing you have any further use for it beyond reference, requires further handling.   I wanted three things – (1) a bare minimum of crap, of things that only serve to get in the way; and (2) I wanted to achieve a high level of structure, right out of the barrel.  I didn’t want to “handle” the information again, at least not in the sense that I was duplicating the initial effort to gather it.  And (3) I wanted to accomplish this by talking and (hopefully) little else… when circumstances demanded.   I wanted my effing phone to listen to me.  And I guess that is the definition of bat-shit crazy.   I’m a busy person.   Hence, speaking….

So, the initial experience was kind of frustrating.   I was able to create the structures that I wanted for organizational purposes, but the processes to me were clunky.  Sometime in the fall of 2015, I was driving to New York City across I-80  from Pennsylvania and into New Jersey.  Daydreaming, I imagine… And it became very clear to me that what I wanted required that I jettison the idea of a constructed image-based user interface, such as SF1, or any other “container” app that would run on a phone.   I think I was as wedded to this idea of what “application” meant =  that it was supposed to “look like” something…. as anybody.  I was girding myself for some inevitable “work” building these visual interfaces to satisfy the purpose of speaking.   It was kind of a surprise – the idea that it did not have to “look like” anything.  That any container app was just going to add complexity. That the application could just “be” a spoken word interface glommed onto a text-messaging chassis.   How simple is that?

What would I call it?  Here’s an aside: I thought I would call it “Speak to me”.   Domain name search turned up the fact that “speakToMe.com” was owned and operated as a phone sex site.  Funny.  I found this out sitting in a rest stop looking over Delaware Water Gap.  That was a very fine day.

Most people, including people of the developer sort with whom I work from day-to-day, are invested… deeply-invested… in the very-structured graphical user interface.  They tend to not even think of this thing that I have called a spoken word interface because it is inherently unstructured and chaotic.  In fact, it basically boils down to this: because “it” does not have an “appearance”, it just is not.  Data acquires its structure from the user interface.  It’s always been that way.   The graphical interface has always been the easiest way to build key-value pairings.  I’ve spoken with developers who have gone so far as to suggest that this work that does not build upon a structured graphical interface does not constitute application development at all.  They’re entitled to their opinions.

Hence, La La Land, not meaning the movie, but the definition – a fanciful state or dreamworld.  Or bath-shit crazy.  Take your pick.

Next month, we’ll have a new tagline.

VeeDee