Inboxing clever

In the process of trying to get from ‘Inbox 600′ (otherwise known as ‘completely out of control’) to something more manageable, I’ve been thinking about what would make email easier for me to deal with. So here’s my wishlist. (Most of this functionality probably exists in at least one email client, or would be scriptable with a bit of effort.)

1. The ability to set an ‘expiry date’ on email when it arrives.

I get a lot of mailing-list email to my personal account which contains offers, “what’s on”-type information, the sort of thing which might be useful at some point over the next couple of weeks but isn’t immediately useful now. I keep it in my inbox as a way of keeping it “on my radar”, reminding me occasionally that it’s there in case I want to look at it; but I’d like to be able to tag it for expiry in, say, a couple of weeks — or when the next email from that mailing-list comes in.

Similarly, at work I get a lot of email containing ideas or suggestions for things that I could do if I had time; I want to set them to expire (or at least require manually ‘renewing’) after a couple of months. If I haven’t found time to do something within that amount of time, then either a) it’s too time-consuming/complicated to do inbetween other tasks, and should either become a genuine project/task and be logged/managed as such, or b) it’s just not actually that important.

Also, most emails don’t need keeping for ever. At work, I keep a lot of ‘paper trails’ in email; if I haven’t referred back to them within 6 months then I’ll probably never need to — but if I haven’t referred back to them in 6 months then I certainly won’t remember to go back and delete them after that time. At home, I keep a lot of confirmation emails from online shopping; I don’t want to waste paper by printing them out, but once I’ve saved them to my ‘admin’ folder they’re basically in a black hole. I want to save them to whichever folder is relevant but also set them to expire in, say, 1 year’s time (very few receipts etc need keeping longer than that). Organisational emails from friends don’t need keeping for ever — I may want to keep the emails where we tried to organise a party or something, but they’re not such works of literary genius or items of such sentimental value that I’m likely ever to revisit them.

(To be honest, I can’t remember when I last went back and re-read an old email for sentimental or nostalgic reasons. Occasionally I grep through my various read-mail files for specific bits of contact information, or for half-remembered words or phrases; but even that’s quite rare. Maybe I shouldn’t be keeping any of it.)

2. The ability to move things from email to other applications more easily.

This is getting better with more integrated calendaring, contacts, task-lists, etc. (not to mention Google Wave!), but there are things that just aren’t easy enough yet:

• When an email contains dates and times, I want to be able to add those easily to my calendar, with a link to the email. It should be possible to delete the email from the event, or vice versa, or both at once.
• When an email contains an address, I want to be able to add it easily to my contacts, with the email address, and whatever context is necessary from the email.
• When an email has a PDF or doc attached, I want to be able to add that easily to a document store, detaching it from the email, but keeping a link to the email. Again, it should be possible to delete email and document in one go.
• When an email contains a bit of text that I want to save, I want to be able to highlight that extract and save it as a snippet, automatically adding a ‘citation’ consisting of the name/email address and the timestamp.

3. The ability to tag and filter more flexibly.

This is the area where it’s almost certainly me who’s deficient, not the email clients. I want to be able to:

• manually tag emails with as many keywords as I like
• search/filter according to the presence/absence of single tags or combinations of tags
• define rules for automated tagging according to sender/subject etc

Tagging probably entirely removes the need for folders (and is obviously more flexible as things can belong in multiple categories), but I admit that I still think in terms of folders. Ideally the user interface would make it possible for me to set up virtual ‘folders’ based on tags, rules, etc to ease the mental transition from one model to the other.

4. The ability to set automated replies based on sender/subject/time

For example, an ‘out-of-office’ reply to work colleagues during out-of-work hours, telling them that I’ll deal with their query in the morning; an ‘out-of-socialising’ reply to friends during work hours, telling them that I may check personal mail during work but they shouldn’t rely on it and I probably won’t have time to give them a long reply (but they can phone my mobile if it’s urgent).

5. The ability to set different levels of alert for new emails or other triggers

Rather than choosing between a popup alert for all new mail or nothing, I’d like to have, say, an SMS alert when email from my husband arrives in my personal inbox; an audible alert when email from certain senders arrives in my work inbox (as it’s probably important enough to interrupt other things for); no alert at all for emails from mailing lists; some kind of alert when my inbox goes over a certain number.

6. The ability to queue specific emails to be sent automatically at specific times

I want to be able to write work-related emails at the end of the day or in odd moments in the evening, but set them to be sent at 8:50am the next day, so I don’t end up getting sucked into work email exchanges late at night. If I write the email and postpone it, I don’t currently have a way to remind myself that there’s an email sitting in the invisible out-tray. Also, if I’m writing official announcements or questions to send to mailing lists, the time when I get a chance to write the text is not necessarily the best time to send the email (something sent to a mailing list on a Friday afternoon risks getting buried in an avalanche of silliness and pedantry; the same email sent on a Monday morning will get a much more sober and potentially more useful response). Ideally, this would work in close conjunction with my calendar, so it’d be easy to, say, set a reminder email to be sent half an hour before a meeting.

7. Built-in coffee-making functionality

Ideally this would be triggered when the inbox goes over a certain number of messages, or when email from specific colleagues arrives … Well, hey, I can dream. :-)

Nameshapes

Sorry for the long hiatus; one of the reasons for the break was that I got married earlier this year (it’s a surprisingly time-consuming process).

My husband took my name when we got married, and as well as providing an opportunity to learn how to make a deed poll for free the process forced us both to think about our web and email presences, the extent to which these are tied to our ‘real’ names, and by extension the searchability of names in general.

One of my husband’s priorities, when he knew he’d be changing his name, was to register a gmail address under his new name (you can see why I married him!). This meant choosing the format of the email address: firstname.lastname, lastname.firstname, initial.lastname… the choices are endless, and it was only when I came to suggest that he should choose something consistent with other family members that I realised that my family have managed to be as inconsistent as possible:

Dad: firstnamelastname@gmail
Mum: firstname.lastname@gmail
Sister: f.lastname@gmail
me: firstnamelas@gmail

In my case I just used the same username as my longest-standing email address, which in turn was chosen because of the username policy on that particular system. The sysadmin writes:

I don’t routinely allocate usernames which are very likely to clash (ie, ones which someone else – including a later new user – would be likely to want.) I also try to avoid allocating usernames in a way that encourages people to guess the email address of someone whose real name they know but whose username they don’t. This means I don’t generally issue just first name, or just surname, unless the name is very unusual. As a suggestion, more sensible alternatives include initial(s) and surname, or first name and remaining initials.

All well and good, but they also imposed an 8-character limit; my surname’s longer than that, and my first name plus initials would have looked like a rather odd word. (These days I’m more likely to run into the minimum character limit, having adopted a 2-character nickname — which was allowed on LiveJournal and Twitter, but disallowed on eBay and a few other sites).

Fortunately, gmail makes our family’s inconsistent data slightly better by ignoring dots in the local-part of the address; so firstname.lastname and firstnamelastname are the same account… as indeed is first...name...last...name, if you want to be awkward. Good news for the early adopter who has the username anticip...........ation@gmail (yes, it’s gone).

Then there’s the searchability of your name. My husband opted to keep his ‘bachelor name’ (to coin a phrase) as his middle name (as women sometimes do with their maiden names — e.g. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Heather Mills McCartney) so that a web search for him under his unmarried name would still find him. We’re both lucky enough to have names which are moderately unusual (we’re not drowning in an unsearchable sea of John/Jane Smiths or equivalent), we’ve been early-enough adopters to claim our names on various sites, and we managed to claim our facebook usernames of choice without even having to get up at 4am.

Despite the excitement of the great username giveaway, Facebook still stands out as the one big social networking service where you’re actually expected to use your real name (I’m not counting LinkedIn because that’s really more about the ‘networking’ than the ‘social’). I cut my internet teeth in an era when an 8-character username was expected, even hip (I got quite attached to the four-letters-four-digits userid I was allocated at university; it was as much part of my identity as my ‘real’ name or my IRC nick), so the idea of using your actual name — your fuzzy, human-readable, nowhere-near-unique, not-even-adequately-namespaced name — seemed just absurd! And yet it works, unless you’re trying to find your schoolfriend Jane Smith (and you’re not even 100% sure that she hasn’t married, so even looking through all “over 500″ Jane Smiths (Janes Smith?) might not help. At the end of the day, we’re used to dealing with the idea of knowing people who share a name; in the UK we even tend to eschew adding a “Jr.” or “III” as disambiguation. Maybe the Facebook fashion is the future: a future where we force computers to adapt to our redundancy-filled systems rather than forcing ourselves into their high-information mould? The sci-fi stereotype seems to tend in the opposite direction (I’d be interested to know if there are earlier instances of this than Zamyatin’s We with its protagonist D-503) but perhaps in 30 years my loyal adherence to the 8-character username I chose in 1999 will seem as archaic as giving a married woman her husband’s initial (e.g. Elizabeth Jones becoming “Mrs J. Smith” on marrying John Smith) does now … or even taking her husband’s surname.

Speechless

Google Voice Search for the iPhone launched today. I’m not convinced that it’s a particularly useful addition to the existing Google app (you have to use the touchscreen in order to launch the app, and by that time surely it’s just as quick to type the word in) but it’s certainly an interesting demonstration of the technology — and very entertaining to test.

The interface is simple: just lift the phone to your ear (a small bleep lets you know that the motion has been detected and it’s ready to start) and speak your search terms. A nice touch is that the ‘soundwave’ icon displayed while it’s processing the input actually does change with each search; in the picture below, the search being performed is actually “parrot sketch” (not the previous search, which is still displayed in the search box at the top of the screen), and it’s a reasonably plausible shape for that phrase:

Voice search shows the shape of your words

It only very occasionally concedes defeat altogether, with a laconic “didn’t get that” (not to be confused with “didn’t go through”, which seems to be a momentary failure to connect):

Google Voice Search failure modes

So how accurate are the results when it does find something? Once I’d tried a few different searches, including my name (an awkward pileup of consonants at the best of times, but it made a valiant attempt) and the name of this blog (reliably recognised, I’m pleased to say!), I decided to try something a bit more systematic. I was hoping to find some kind of list of words used to calibrate speech recognition software, but eventually found a spondee list for Speech Reception Threshold testing (Stanley A. Gelfand, Essentials of audiology, New York : Thieme, 2001. Appendix B). Recipients of the test are expected to be familiar with these words/phrases already, but if that’s the case, Google should be familiar with them too; and if not, then it’s as good as any other arbitrary selection. I tried each word twice, and recorded the results:

word/phrase	first guess	second guess
airplane	☓	sam
armchair	comcast	amtrak
backbone	experian	experian
baseball	✓	✓
birthday	sta	spa
blackboard	✓	✓
cookbook	cooks	✓
cowboy	calpoly	✓
doormat	doormats	✓
drawbridge	corporate	old bridge
duck pond	✓	✓
eardrum	income	its
earthquake	escalate	s clinic
eyebrow	✓	✓
greyhound	✓	✓
hardware	holland flag	hot
headlight	✓	✓
horseshoe	ocean	✓
hotdog	✓	pa
ice cream	✓	✓
inkwell	✓	✓
mousetrap	✓	myspac
mushroom	machine	schwinn
northwest	✓	southwest
nutmeg	nuts mag	netflix
oatmeal	betrayal	israel
outside	✓	✓
padlock	hotchalk	adult
pancake	✓	✓
playground	✓	✓
railroad	nile virus	male names
stairway	skyway	amway
sunset	✓	chat
toothbrush	✓	flash
whitewash	white phlox	squash
woodwork	wood flat	flat

NB: the application does warn that “Voice Search only works in English, and works best for North American English accents”; I didn’t attempt to fake a North American English accent, but I did try to speak clearly and minimise background noise.

It’s interesting how many of the incorrect results were company or brand names: Comcast, Amtrak, Experian, Schwinn, Netflix, Hotchalk, Amway. They don’t all get more hits on Google than the corresponding correct word, either (there are more armchairs on Google than Comcasts, and more backbones than Experians), though perhaps they do get more hits than other incorrect guesses which the voice recognition rejects.

In most cases, the incorrect result is similar in shape to the search word: it’s easy to see how one gets from “drawbridge” to “corporate”, from “horseshoe” to “ocean”, from “mushroom” to “machine”, or even from “railroad” to “male names”. I would say that some of the incorrect guesses have more syllables than the original words, but syllable counting is notoriously difficult; and when allowing for the difference between British English and North American English accents as well, all bets are off.

However, there are some really baffling guesses: “hotdog” only shares at most one vowel with Google’s guess of “pa”, and “birthday” is a lost cause — only the second half of the word seems to come through, with the ‘thday’ /TteI/ being rendered as ‘sta’ (/steI/) and ‘spa’ (/speI/). That’s my best guess, anyway. And I really can’t see how you get from “airplane” to “sam”.

The one really frustrating thing, though, is not being able to ‘teach’ the search: there’s no way to teach the application what your voice sounds like with a series of reference words; and there’s no way to tell Google what you were really searching for, not even the usual “did you mean…” option — though it’s possible that they use clickthroughs from searches as a rough indicator of success. Google could, if they recorded each search and allowed users to ‘transcribe’ their searches at the same time, amass a vast corpus of spoken English words and their written forms — in fact, this is apparently what they intended to do with the previous incarnation of Google Voice Search — but the privacy implications of this are problematic, particularly given that the iPhone Google app has to be downloaded via iTunes and hence via a personal and extremely trackable account.

Incidentally, the title of this post is what I got when using Voice Search to search for “speech recognition” — Google Voice Search is not quite speechless, but it’s also not quite there yet.

Well-formed

The TEI Members’ Meeting earlier this month gave me a perfect opportunity to show off my XML earrings:

<head> </head>

They were simple to make; I just printed out the tags on ordinary white paper, cut the paper around them to a triangular template (based on some earrings I already had, so I knew they wouldn’t be too big to wear) and laminated the result (leaving a reasonable margin, partly to prevent the laminated layers from separating and partly to leave room to attach the actual earring hooks). The laminating plastic is thin enough that I could just use a needle to punch through that ‘margin’ to insert the hooks.

The problem with using XML tags for decorative purposes is that anything requiring symmetry is always thwarted by the fact that the closing tag is always one character longer than its opening counterpart: there’s no way to make your <tag> and </tag> line up exactly. I’d already encountered this problem when making Christmas cards for colleagues last year, too:

First drafts of an XML-ish Christmas card

While hand-lettering makes it easy to compensate for the asymmetry with creative kerning, the result doesn’t quite look like XML any more.

There is something iconic about markup, though, beyond the punning potential of <head> tags on earrings or hats, and <body> tags (or perhaps <front/> and <back/>?) on tshirts, and so on. Maybe it’s just the retro cool of monospace text; or maybe it’s more that it appeals to our desire to name things, to label them, to impose on them our interpretation of them.

Whatever the reason, I’m pleased to say that the earrings got a good receptionl! I’m happy to make more for other people on a best-effort basis, but equally happy for other people to copy the idea — and I note that someone else is selling a much more robust-looking version over on Etsy. XML: the iconic designer brand that anybody can use!

Fallbacks

The really revolutionary thing about the iPhone’s GPS system (‘A-GPS’, or Assisted GPS) is that it nearly always has a fallback option. First it tries to get a fix on a GPS satellite; if it can’t do that, it tries to locate you via wifi (hopefully more accurately than whatismyipaddress.com, which thinks I’m in Solihull, or ip-adress.com [sic] which thinks I’m in London — both quite wrong). If wifi fails, it tries to triangulate your position from mobile phone towers. I guess the reasoning is that if you’re out of reach of satellites, wifi and phone reception then really, you’re completely lost in more way than one.

Google maps: homing in

The iPhone has a similar strategy when it comes to internet access: if there are local known wireless networks available, it will try to join them; if there are local unknown wireless networks available, it can be configured either to prompt you to join them or let you find them for yourself. If wireless networks can’t be found or joined it will try for 3G; if that fails, EDGE; if that fails, GPRS.

iPhone networking symbols

Try for the best first; but be prepared to accept second best, third best, and so on, to the bitter end. It’s the same strategy as Emily Dickinson describes:

The Heart asks Pleasure — first —
And then — Excuse from Pain —
And then — those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering —

And then — to go to sleep —
And then — if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die —