Self-aware digital assistants

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
                                                                                      - Lao Tzu

Does anyone else find it annoying that the digital assistants that are built into modern consumer technology (like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana) can answer questions about the world, but when you start to experience problems with your device they are the least helpful "person" in the world?

I recently upgraded to Windows 10 at home and I think the first 3 times I used Cortana, I tried to ask her questions about my installation.  Here are the type of questions I expect a smart digital assistant to be able to answer:

1. Is everything OK?  (did the installation go smoothly?  any errors/warnings I should know about?)
2. Why is my computer/phone going so slow?  (what is the current bottleneck?  CPU?  Memory?  What is using all the resources?)
3. Why am I out of disk space?  (what is the largest set of folders and files in my system?)
4. Why aren't my speakers working?  (scan device drivers, tell me what speakers are/aren't connected/make suggestions)

Questions like this might not be sexy, but I think it will feel natural to ask your phone/computer about itself.  Maybe digital assistants like Siri and Cortana should spend some time learning about themselves before they turn outward and help their users...

Personal searches from the address bar in Firefox and Chrome

Most modern browsers allow you to invoke the default search engine directly from the Address bar (aka the awesome bar or the omnibox), but did you know that you can easily access other search engines from the very same box? Assigning a keyword for alternate searches will allow you to invoke that search directly from the Address bar by typing the keyword, followed by a space and then the search query.

When paired with a shortcut to jump to the Address bar (e.g. Control + L), these keyword searches make for great workflow in the browser.

Adding new keyword search is easy: simply right-click on any search box and choose Add As Search Engine (Chrome) or Add a Keyword for this Search... (Firefox). Use the Keyword field to give the search a short handle that you can quickly type into the address bar to prefix your search.

How It Works

In both Chrome and Firefox, the URL field is the secret to making this work. The browser will automatically replace the "%s" string with the contents of your search query, meaning you can define a custom search for just about any URL.

To edit a keyword search, or to create your own from scratch, the process varies a little between the two broswers:

• In Chrome, right-click the address bar and select Edit Search Engines...
• In Firefox, the keyword searches are managed as bookmarks and can be created/edited from the manage bookmarks dialog.

My Searches

Full disclosure: the real reason I wrote this post is to document my keyword searches for future me. If you are a web developer or happen to use the same services as me, then maybe you can benefit from them too:

Site	Keyword	URL
Wikipedia	wp	http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=%s
Delicious (links)	d	https://delicious.com/lmsurprenant/%s
Stack Overflow	so	http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%s
Mozilla Developer Network	mdn	http://mdn.io/%s
Node Packaged Modules	npm	http://node-modules.com/search?q=%s
Evernote	ever	https://www.evernote.com/Home.action?offer=www_menu#n=056dfe4a-e94a-4d9f-8e49-cac92a0d21bb&ses=1&sh=5&sds=5&x=polygraphy&

Note that the Evernote one is custom. To create one for your own account, try the following:

1. Log in
2. Do a search
3. Find and replace your query with "%s"

I don't understand why they make that so hard, but at least it seems to work (an improvement from a year ago):

@evernotehelps How do I set a keyword search to search my notes from browser url? In old website, I just set to https://t.co/pBgnkTNor1

— Lee Surprenant (@lmsurprenant) November 20, 2014

@lmsurprenant Got it. This isn't something that we directly support. Let me see if I can gather some information on this.

— Evernote Helps (@evernotehelps) November 25, 2014

Being a good Netizen

If your job involves working on a computer all day (especially if you are in the technology business), then you probably couldn't do your job without the world wide web.  Please consider it your duty to give back.

As knowledge workers, we are trained to pull information from across the web and combine it with our own knowledge and experiences.  On some problems, good information is easy to find.  On others, you need to invest significant effort to figure it out.  In the latter case, post your insights back to the web.

With social media (and modern software development), this is easier than ever.  Try to link your post to the most authoritative place for the subject at hand.  If you cannot post it in-context, then provide enough context so that someone reasonably familiar with the topic could understand what you are saying.

This will make the content searchable and it will help both you and others.  The harder it is to find good info, the more time you spend on research, the more obscure your insights, the more important it is to post.

It sounds obvious, but I'm amazed at the number of engineers I've worked with that will spend significant time figuring something out, and then simply move on to the next problem without committing their findings to the public record.  When I do that, I'm doomed to repeat the exercise all over.

Leave the web a little better than you found it.