Speak Freeley with an Accent

So,
I’m sitting here in St. Louis. I’ve been here since Saturday trying to figure out how to make computers talk to people.

I’ve had one of those interesting summers work wise. I got pretty fed up with complete silliness that someone came up with where they put a bunch of 20 something contractors with a good slide show in charge of a bunch of twenty year veterans of software development. Think “Office Space”. Then think about the boss of Jennifer Aston complaining that she didn’t wear enough snazz or what ever it was. That guy was supposedly my boss or my mentor or something. The difference was, he was a consultant and I was a, ah….Well, I sure as Hell wasn’t his employee.

When it comes to the Jennifer Aston example, I tend to think waitresses should take orders and serve food. It’s a pretty straight forward job. Giving customer pointers on food choices is a good extension of the job. Being silly at the job, Eh. I mean places like Friday’s are a quick gimmick, but it wears off, and besides if your food sucks, all the gimmicks in the world won’t help.

But, back to the software world. It wasn’t snazz, it was apparently metrics we were looking for. The consulting company involved was Accenture. You know, they put an Accent on everything. It’s the accent that makes foreigners sexy. If everything we do is accented with good metrics and procedures it only follows sexy software will surely built. This is the same corollary that says if a woman wears a lot of eye liner, she’ll be great in bed.

I’m a pretty much regular software building type of guy. In a way, I’m the master carpenter of software building. I can frame in a window in a couple hours. (From scratch, cutting latch holes and hinges etc.) Now, if you ask me to build a house, that has say, 50 windows in it. (Mine has that many.) I can do it. It’s going to take about a hundred hours and two and a half weeks. But that’s a small enough job, I would do it myself. But, ask me to install all the windows in 1000 unit housing development in two months, I might come up with a different method. It’s a hundred thousand hours worth of work. I might hire a hundred fifty-six people and teach them to frame windows. I’d allocate some time to teach say five people to frame and hang windows, and then have those five teach five. In about two weeks I could have a crew that could bang out the windows in six weeks. I’d even buy a 156 hammers and levels to help speed the job. That’s my method. Methodical (hence why it’s called a method), planned, considering logistics. I’d take into consideration training time, supplies, crew chiefs, basic stuff. I’d also consider customer satisfaction.

The man that thought the Accent on the job was what was most important had another take on carpentry. Getting people to work was most important. We would hire a hundred fifty six people and start billing the customer right away for carpentry. The master carpenters we just hired could learn on the job. The customers buying the houses could just sort of explain what they wanted with their windows over the phone. Bill Gates proved windows were more of a abstract concept anyways. We’d know whether our carpenters were doing a good job cause we’d have special employees skilled in measuring their progress in obtaining carpentry skills. We’d also promise to do the work in one month cause that’s what the customer wanted. The way the customer would know the windows project was doing good, is we’d have special Red, Yellow, Green report (like a stop light) on the status of the windows. We’d send that to the customer each day, rather than letting them just look at the houses or windows. We would leave the interpretation of the Red/Yellow/Green status up to lots of consultants analyzing the reports to determine their meaning. We’d bill the customer twice as much for these experts as we do carpenters.

Quite a few “Winning Strategies in Window Construction Synergies” Powerpoint presentations later, I’d had lot of beer one night and decided to find another vocation. Actually, I decided I didn’t need to learn a new Accent. I can already do like a hundred. My employees request them for entertainment when we are hammering away at the windows that are our software day after day. It helps time go by in the window factory. It just so happens while I was drinking that one of the executives at the company was drinking also. She asked me how I liked my “get a new Accent job?” I answered her in about six different English dialects.

I probably said too much.

It turns out she had just been given the job to make computers in the company talk to customers. (I kid you not.) She needed a person well versed in dialects to head up the effort. She mentioned this to a senior VP.

My fate was sealed. That VP called me and told me a I had a new job teaching computers to talk to customers and making the computers understand what the customers were saying back. (It called Speech Science. I kid you not.) We are building something that basically lets you talk to a computer like it was a customer care agent. (I kid you not.) We’ve rolled it out in quite a few states. Its been so successful we need about a 156 more programmers to work on this stuff and build new speaking computers. Thousands of them, I’ve started hiring and training these programmers. It’s pretty cool, and there are no consultants looking to put an accent on the project anywhere near me.

But I will tell you this, this speak freely stuff has led to some weird situations. I said the following sentence to my trainees as I left for St. Louis on Friday.

“When I get back, I want you all talking to computers, and I expect them to be talking back.”