Connected Devices Weekly Update/2016-12-01

This week's update

• Engineering team on track towards doing Sprint 2 demo Friday, Dec 2:
  1. Cloud team: continuation of api implementation and logs of Sensorthings interaction
  2. Client team: continuation of the mobile implementation with wireframe options

Upcoming Tasks

• Project planning and Goals for Q1-Q3/2017 during Hawaii Work Week of Dec 5
• Dec 15 - Perform Rapid Risk Analysis (RRA) review with Enterprise Security

Software Schedule - Dec 16 Milestone:

• Firmware: Collect real data from sensors, transmit to cloud

• Cloud: SensorThings API, receive and store sensor readings

• Web: Ability to browse collected sensor readings

Hardware Schedule

• Dec 19 Development boards ready for Mozilla

• Gate 1 pitch in Hawaii on Thursday - 8th December

• UR 10 - Voicemail Study is completed
  • Users liked both voice call and voice mail features
  • Grandparents liked the idea of communicating using an app
  • Grand kids enjoyed using the device

• Engineering Update
  • BOM cost of $41 provided by John
  • WebRTC working on BeagleBone black

Updates

• Design / Architecture paper sent for internal review within Mozilla teams.
• Continued work on Platform and product alignments
  • Understanding product team architecture and technical design choices. Discuss trade offs. esp the components or decisions that are at odds with creating reusable components
  • Finding the right starting points for extracting reusable components v/s creating new components ground-up

Hawaii work week

• • Thu 4.15pm - CD Platform elective (Ballroom Kona 5). Will discuss the background, value prop of the platform, our thinking behind going with WoT and plans going forward
  • Friday 9.30-11am - Platform and Product team syncups.
    • Discuss alignment and extraction plans, developer offerings for each initiative, DevKit etc
    • Developer story: Create a plan for Track1 developer facing contributions (tie to developer events in 2017)
    • 2017 milestones & resource plans

• Implemented training checkpoints. In case of crashes, we can now resume training at the last epoch it completed.
• We now have different graphs for training, validating, and testing.
• Team is working on Demos for Hawaii!

DeepSpeech Demo Hours!

• Thursday, Dec 8 from 8:30AM-11AM in Kona Ballroom 5 (CD Homeroom)
  • Talking Santa
    • Talking santa head where you say a sentence to it and it repeats it back to you
  • Browser add-on that has basic control of browser
    • Can take basic commands on the browser like “Go to previous page”
  • Live transcription demo
    • Client that talks to tensorflow server and a web page. You can say a phrase and it'll transcribe it for you.
• Live learning! (Thank you Tilman and Reuben)
  • Gif of how model learns over epochs

Project VoiceBank Kick-off!

• We will be kicking off Project VoiceBank (an open source speech corpora) with an IoT Lightning Talk and awesome stickers
• Blog Post: https://connected.mozilla.org/2016/11/28/the-next-phase-for-project-vaani/
  • Andre has been working to revamp Project VoiceBank Website where Mozillians can start recording their voices.

Abigail Study with Prototypes

• Completed testing with about 10 consumers in their homes. Received very positive feedback. In general they liked the use of Abigail for all three scenarios tested: reminders, door and window monitoring, and notifications when children return home.

Conclusions

• In this week's check in with leadership it was agreed that the Abigail product would provide functionality, reminders for the entire family, that currently doesn't exist in the target market. The team discussed alternatives to get Abigail to market more quickly.
• Also acknowledged that Connected Devices has a limited number of resources and cannot continue carrying forward every project that shows promise, and a decision was made to move Abigail into the backlog.
• The possibility of adding Abigail's activity monitoring functionality to HomeWeb at some point in the future to differentiate HomeWeb was identified as showing some potential.

• Checkin 29th November to update about the progress of the project (Slides and video recording)

Development

• Busy last week with test run and bug fixing, we had to fix some issues and delay the upload of the application from Nov 23 to Nov 26th.
• MVP Magnet client already available in the stores in iOS and Android today
• London Pilot promotion through mailing list, discourse and our twitter account to track downloads, metrics and gather feedback

Experiments/User Studies

• User Validation in SF started yesterday (30th Nov). This study, based on a mock-up prototype, will be run in Balmey Alley (Value-prop video)
  • Problem Hypotheses: People have FOMO about knowledge and experiences in the world around them, existing solutions provide useful practical information but are geared towards consumption of goods and services, not gaining knowledge or experiences
  • Experience Strategy: Provide a sense of adventure and progress in the experience, combine the digital and physical worlds in a unique and compelling way, provide visually engaging stories and encourage user-generated content to add value.
  • Problem-solution fit - does our concept have value?

Marketing

• Campaign releases focusing on one segment (street art)
• Partner with publisher(s) with existing followers

• Provided an update to the Product Innovation Board on the results of our landing page experiment and technical feasibility study
  • The basic product value proposition is solid, the foundational feature set has been validated
  • We now need to focus our energy on defining a clear and compelling end to end customer experience
• Next steps:
  • Hawaii Team Sessions - Deep dive into existing data and assumptions (Market, Audience, Needs), Ideation on full Customer Experience (USPs, potential service layer)
  • Pre-order test - with a more specific product offering (including hardware and software mockups) for a more specific target market
  • Follow-up hardware evaluation - to address gateway performance issues

Engineering

• Went with the backup plan to build the next game board prototype. New board will be rectangular instead of square and have a grid of 4 LEDs per cell. Not enough time to build boards for use in studies with children at the Hawaii All Hands, so these studies will not be held.
• New board will be available for interaction at the work week, and the team plans to talk to Mozillians to collect feedback.
• Invitation for anyone is interested in helping out to join the team.
• Three games are being readied for use on the new board.

User Studies

• Product study with 25 participants at the SCVBC was held on Friday, November 18th to gauge reaction to and to gain impressions of various form factors.
• Participants were also taught how to use the Lighthouse camera device, took pictures of items, and voice tagged them. An image matching exercise followed.
• Participants were also interviewed to collect user interaction data.
• Response to the device by the study participants continued to be extremely positive.

• Study data has been synthesized and a presentation is being readied for the Gate 1 pitch scheduled for December 8th.

• Amazon announced Rekognition, an image image detection and recognition engine powered by deep learning on AWS.
• Amazon also announced Polly, a text - to - speech engine, and Lex, deep learning-powered automatic speech recognition and natural-language understanding engine that represents the technology behind Alexa.
• Researchers at the University of Surrey and at Wright State University published a paper on the challenges that search engines will have to access IoT data. The paper argues that "there is an urgent need to develop new search solutions which will allow information from IoT sources to be found and extracted. While existing search engines have ever more sophisticated and effective ways of crawling through web pages and searching for textual data, the article argues that they will not be effective in accessing the type of numerical and sensory data which IoT devices will need to gather."
• Consumer research from Forrester on voice / digital assistant usage says that 18 to 36 years old people in the US are more likely to use them than other age groups and that the most popular activities are:
  • Looking up information
  • Getting directions
  • Sending messages and making calls
  • Playing music
  • Setting an alarm
  • Scheduling meetings
• Consumer research from Forrester on the Smart Home says that while 61% of people in the US are interested in smart products, only 7% of them have them. The top reasons for the lack of adoption are:
  • Monthly service cost would be too high
  • Privacy concerns
  • Initial Cost of setup would be too high
  • The technology could malfunction on a regular basis
  • Reliability of the device in a power outage situation
  • It could compromise the security of the home
• In a report on the top IoT platforms, Forrester identifies the 5 types of functionality that can be found in IoT platforms:
  • Connect: create and manage the link from the device to the internet
  • Secure: protect IoT devices, data, and identity from intrusion
  • Manage: control the provisioning, maintenance and operation of IoT devices
  • Analyze: transform data into timely, relevant insights and action
  • Build: create applications and integrate with enterprise systems
• The report also analyzes the 11 top IoT platforms and puts IBM's Watson as the leader with the broadest range of advanced IoT use cases, followed by PTC, GE and Microsoft.