Voice in a Can with Damian Mehers

Episode Transcript
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Leo Dion (host) (00:00):
Hey folks, thank you so much for being patient with me.
I'm in the middle of moving as I'mgonna keep pumping these episodes out.
These were all recorded lastmonth I will be speaking at the
Server site Swift conference.
. You can use the promo code "EMPOWERAPPS" to get 15% off the conference.
Check the show notes for more details.
that's it.
All right enjoy thisepisode with Damien.
Bye.

(00:24):
Welcome to anotherepisode, empower Apps.
I'm your host, Leo Dion.
Today I am joined by Damian Mayers.
Damien, thank you so much for coming on.

Damian Mehers (guest) (00:34):
My pleasure.
Thank

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about your app.
The Life and Death of Voice in a can.
We've done a.
A couple of episodes where peoplewould shut down apps or sold off apps.
We infamously did our episodewith Christian about Apollo.
But I'm really interested intalking about voice in a can and

(00:57):
how that whole ecosystem panned out.
But before we get into that, I'll letyou go ahead and introduce yourself.

Sure.
Yeah, I'm been programmingsince I was 14 years old on
my one K zx 81 19, 19 81.
I'm 57 years old now.
Seen, I've seen the industry changerather a lot, started programming on in
basic Ada C plus C, and Java as well.
Of Swift and Swift in my own time,

(01:26):
in my day.

Okay.
Awesome.
How did you said you it was a Zed.
What what do you have experience withoutside of the Apple space in your
whatever, 40 years of programming.

Yeah, I like I said, I started programming on these
kinda APIC computers, these at 6 5 0 2.

Okay.

And I, that was when I got my, my my start.
And I'm pretty convinced thatsitting in front of my BBC
computer at the time trying to.
That was actually the not becauseI wanted to do to get them, to not
pay for them, but because I wantedto have infinite lives, but spending
hours and hours debugging anddecrypting, and disassembling the code.
That kind of taught me how to programbecause it, it gave me the sense of.

(02:12):
Ability to focus forimmense quantities of time.
Believing that one day you'llactually get what you want do done.
So anyway, that, yeah, and, but myfirst kind of serious job was on,
on computers from a company calledDeck Digital Equipment Corporation.
As a student, I went to work forthem on the axes and and at the
time it was amazing when I got thatinternship, I thought I made it
because, was the biggest, secondbiggest computer company in the world.

(02:33):
It.

Yep.
Right after IBM, right?

Exactly.
But now of course they'vegone, so it's a little bit of a
warning in the back of my mind.
You working hotness and thegreatness, but you never know.

Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
What do you do right nowif you mind me asking?

Yeah.
So until the end of last year, I workedas a consultant at Nestle, which are
a big Swiss company working on mobileapps, Android, iOS, using zamarin, and
the replacement, which is Donnet Maui.
And now I'm working for a privatebank in Geneva, again, as a
consultant doing Donnet Maui.
So in my evenings I do c say Swift andSwift I, and during daytime I'm doing

(03:12):
C and it can be, it can break my mind alittle bit sometimes trying to switch.
Kind of good to, to have a footin both worlds and to understand.
There was some interesting concepts,the whole thing with with awai, that's
been there in c for a long time, butmore then the new model in Swift is is
something that doesn't exist in, in cthe runtime or the time I should say.

(03:33):
Sorry.
Checking,

we, we talked a few episodes ago, I forgot with who.
It was, about how they're changingthe name from Zain to.net, Maui.
What is the difference betweenthese two technologies exactly.

Zamarin was the original technology that Miguel Deta
and Na Friedman created back in the day.
And then Microsoft acquired Zamarin.
And for a long time thingswere looking rosy and great.
But then Miguel left and so did Na.
He was wanting for a while.
I think Microsoft decided theybasically wanted to rewrite it.
So a lot of the underlying foundationsare the same, but the way rendering

(04:07):
for the, for some what was calledzamarin forms, which is the kind of
the UI little one on both iOS andAndroid is is being rewritten in Maui.
And the big thing thereis really that it's.
It's not doing what I think Flatterdoes, which is to render the UI
components themselves, they actuallyrender as native components.
So a button in actually renders asan iOS or an Android real button.

(04:29):
But so yeah, so it's a kindof an evolution if you like.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
So let's get into it.
Let's talk a little bit aboutvoice in a, can you wanna explain
what this app does and how youcame up with the idea for it?

Yes, does is not quite right word.
What it did I should say is
Anyway, yeah, it's.
So the kind of the, this, the backstoryis I was working at Evernote and I'd
just been let go along with the CEOand of Evernote Phil Libin and he we
had to tea in San Francisco and hewas just, we were just talking and he
talked about this new device that wascoming out had just come out and it was
taking the world by storm a little bit,which was the echo, the Amazon Echo.

(05:07):
And so he ordered one from Amazon and.
I took it home and most technologythat Damien brings home is not well
received by the family, but thistime it was actually sat in the
kitchen and we used it to play radio.
We used to, add items of theshopping list, set timers.
So it was actually the rare successin the household that the whole
family come got on board with.
And I was browsingaround on the internet.
I was I had a long commute working in.

(05:33):
I was looking around to see if Amazonhad any APIs, and sure enough they
had an actual it was called the AmazonVoice Service, which was designed not
only for device manufacturers, whowanted to create their own echos, but
they specifically allowed apps as well.
So I started playing trying tobasically send an audio recording
to their service and get back a.

(06:00):
Amazon has some veryspecific requirements.
Like you, you can't sendaudio through you prerecorded.
It's gotta be live streamingfrom the microphone.
So I was doing some pretty lowlevel stuff, to, on the audio
devices to grab the sample audiosamples and stream them up.
And once I got working on the iPhoneI then there's actually real no
real point in creating an Amazonclient for the iPhone because, but.

(06:25):
Up and running on the Applewatch as well, because Ammar was
supported on the Apple Watch.
So that's, but this wasthe very first apple Watch.
Maybe the Apple Watch twowas around then as well.
It was very slow.
Horrendously slow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was no Swift ui.
It was all, it was, I.
There was very little ui actually, itwas mainly the engine underneath I got

(06:45):
the app actual running on the AppleWatch, but it was horrendously slow
because it was very early hardware.
But but it was, I was delighted.
And the nice thing was I wasable to reuse a whole engine
that I created in c for the, onthe Apple watch on the iPhone.
I was able to get it running onthe iPhone, on the Apple Watch.
Sorry.
And so that was and eventuallyI released it and you never
know what's gonna happen.
But but Tom Ver, Tom Warren fromthe Verge picked it up and wrote

(07:08):
an article about it, and that wasand your wildest dreams come true.
And then you realize maybe it wasa bit of a nightmare because the
first version is never that, great.
There were always issues.
And so my sales did I think I madeabout $3,000 in the first day.
And part of me was thinking,Ooh, I can retire now.
I've got, it's gonna carryon like this forever.
But of course it didn't, itdropped down to, I think I always

(07:29):
paid for my lunch, so 10, $15

how'd you monetize it, if you mind me asking?

No.
Yeah.
What I did at the time wasa one-time purchase of $2.
So that was the, the model.
I don't, it's such a difficultthing to know what the, the right
thing to do is generally, if you'vegot people complaining about the
price and people saying it's toolow, then you're in the right spot.
And I did have, I didn't have manypeople complaining about the price,
but but I probably could havecharged more, but it really wasn't

(07:54):
a thing to, to make lots of money.
It was as much a passionproject as anything.
So I didn't yeah, going today,maybe I would've done the
$2 a year or something, but

What was the most, okay, so did you do this all on C?

Yes, I did it all in C Yes, I did initially all in C
until I rewrote it in Swift and Swift.

Okay.
What let's talk about that.
What was that experience like?
Switching from Zarin on C over to

Yeah when after Microsoft acquired Zamarin,
they decided they were no longer gonnasupport the Apple Watch for for Zamarin.
And that was a, there was a atthat point I had, because Zamarin
ran pretty much everywhere.
I had it running on my Xbox, on mySamsung watches on, on Android watches
pretty much everywhere you can imagine.
But I, but really all themoney, all the intention was.

(08:40):
Was coming from the Apple ecosystem,so I decided that it might be
a, it was a good time becausethey, I couldn't create an Apple
Watch app anymore using zin.
That was a time to to rewrite it.
And fortunately, swift UIhad just, was out by then.

Yeah.

So the experience was, a complete rewrite
of thousands of lines of code.
But I did the, I'm happy, theapproach I did in the end, which was
to create tests where I basicallyfed input to my C-sharp engine and
captured the bite stream output.
And then I, when I wasbuilding the Swift version,
I had all these unit tests

Oh wow.

that I had backward compat, there
a bug in the old one on the.

It was the same

you are, working at a quite low level,
that I was that it was working.
So it wasn't,
it was as much about learning Swiftas it was about, c and learning
the the the patents, if you like,of the new programming language.
But but even.
I think Don do net's frameworklibraries, the stuff that just
basically comes for free was muchricher than the much more evolved,

(09:42):
I would say, maybe more clearlymore mature than the swift ones.
So there were some things that I coulddo, I can't remember off the top of
my head, but things I could do in CSharp, that were just, that were built
in that, that weren't quite as easyand swift but I got there in the end.

What were one of the things that you could do in C that you

I wish I could remember off the top of my voice.
Off the top of my head.
Sorry.
There's something called Link in, in,in C, which is language integrated
query, which is really nice.
And yeah, and it's not as rich,you've got, I've usually got map
and filter, in, in Swift, but it'snot I guess some of the some of the

Because basically what you could do is you could do
like a SQL query on a data structureessentially, and can figure out all
the functional programming for youthat you would essentially have to
hand write and swift Yeah, no, I

It translates into a meth chain.
It's synthetic sugar.
It looks in a th blood to

Like I would say like at Predicates
are probably the closest to

a little bit.

Yeah.
But not, but a lot more robust I would

yeah.
Yeah.
It's been there, I think since2008 or something like that.
It was a long time thatSwift had been there.
Yeah.
I also, but at that point, Amazon werereleasing something called the Alexa
Presentation language, which was a UIfor the Echoes, for the new Echoes.
And I wanted to add thatto the to my new app.
And so basically the way Iworked was that the Alexa sent

(11:02):
down a service, sent down a.
Structure, which describes, all theelements and the rea and the event
handlers on all sites, sorts of stuff.
I initially had dreams of implementingmy own pasa for that, but it was, it's
really rich and therefore complicated.
But there was a library from Amazon,which I could basically feed in the

(11:22):
JS O and it would back events and.

Yeah.

Unfortunately that was written in c plus, and
at that time there was no swift toc plus integration there is now.
So I discovered that lightshave objective wrapping, c plus
calls in objective C and thencalling them hit from Swift.
So I did that for basicallyall the stuff I needed to
do and essentially I was.
Dynamically generatingthe Swift UI on the fly.

(11:49):
Not a compile time, but a runtimedynamically generating the ui.
Maybe the shopping list contains a,a frame with, toggle elements that
could be swiped, and then I wasactually getting the Jag gesture
feeding that back to the Alexapresentation or the Alexa presentation,
language library, and getting.
But it all worked amazinglywell, and it worked on the Apple
Watch as well, so it worked well.

(12:11):
So that was yeah, so that, so thewhole experience was, part of it was
really just the delight of learningsomething new in, in Swift and Swift
ui and, and then also it's true, it'sdefinitely the case that building
native, especially if you're workingat quite a low level, is easier, than
than using something like c and summary.

This watch app, was it like an independent watch app?
Was it a companion app?

It was a,

component?

yeah it was a it was a companion nap.
I don't, I think I might.
I don't remember if I decoupled itfrom the watch app, from the phone app,
but it worked totally independently.
I was out for a run, in the middleof the fields with just my Apple
watch listening to podcasts, and Icould add items to my shopping list
or turn on my electric blanket,whatever I want to do, using the

(12:57):
Echo voice in a account on my AppleWatch using the the data connection.
So it was independentfrom that perspective.

You also build a Vision OS app.
Is this correct?

Damian Mehers (guest): Yeah, that's right. (13:08):
undefined
So voice on a can was doing well and thevision, apple Vision Pro was announced.
I'm sitting in Switzerland.
There is no Apple Vision Pro available.
I applied a few times for the forthe events that they were holding
for developers, but it never Inever got accepted, but but still,
but I still, I had this vision.
Forget the, forgive the pun ofcoming into an office, like I'm
sitting in a, completing your office.

(13:29):
I put on my Vision Pro and Ijust pick up my virtual echo and
place it on a desk, next to me.
And then whenever I want to use it,I just look at it, tap my fingers, it
lights up, and I can say, add thingsto my shopping list or, turn on my
electric blanket, or, and then my visionwas that the u the UI would pop up.
From the unfer, from theVirtual six cylinder.

(13:50):
So I got all this working inthe simulator and it wasn't that
complicated a Vision Pro app.
It was basically a, in terms of theui, it was a cylinder, that I like
when you look at it, it lights up.
I did take the tap gestureand I changed the UI to the
cylinder's rim to light up to the
listen.
And then I was able to project a SwiftUI view, for example, the shopping

(14:12):
list, you could scroll the shoppinglist in, in the echo, in the virtual
Alexa, wait, I'm gonna set off my Alexa.
But and then it would go away.
So I got it all workingand and in the simulator.
Never got a chance to to try it out forreal until, I dunno, a couple months
ago when I actually got a Vision Pro.
But but I, it was accepted by Amazon.
You never know.

(14:33):
Sorry, apple, it wasaccepted, you never know.
But but they accepted it and and soI was there launched a, so when the.
Developer conference came up andthey showed that massive wall of
all the icon vision on the farright side, half my icon visible.

Your head was peeking out.
Yeah.
That's hilarious.
Speaking of like getting accept,what's the different, like kinda
what's the difference in characterbetween App store review and Amazon
accepting your Amazon like Alexa app?
What's

I was, yeah, I was really early when I released my app.
So if for the echo, there wasn'tapproval of process, but I just
sailed through however, and thensaid they accepted it and I could,
I created all my other ones.
Never an issue.
However, driving home from workone day got a notification on
my phone from something aboutlegal, Amazon, blah, blah, blah.

(15:25):
I couldn't look at it.
Of course, I drove on until Icould pull over safely and looked
at it and wasn't sure enough.
A, an email from a lawyer from Amazonwith a long checklist of things that
they wanted to verify that I was doing.
For example, that I wasn't saving theaudio locally all this kind of stuff.
But I was playing it by the book and weexchanged emails backwards and forwards.
Stern, but it gotfriendly towards the end.

(15:46):
And the final thing you said to mewas how cool he thought my app was.
The lawyer said that.
So that was nice.
So all in all, I would say it waspretty straightforward from the Amazon
perspective, from the Apple perspective.
When I had my RIN version of the app,I tried to release it for the Mac and
they, they rejected it and they said itwas, I can't remember what the reason
was, basically too generic or something.
I can't remember what, but whenI rewrote it in Swift and Swift

(16:08):
ui, I did it for the iPhone,for the Apple Watch and the Mac.
And then again, it wentthrough without any problem.
So as we know, it depends on theday, the reviewer you have, so
it's just the way it's, yeah.
Apple still a bit of a we allknow the stories, It be a bit,
you just have to be lucky,

yeah.
What so you got this email fromyour, this lawyer, were there any
other emails or contact you gotfrom customers that made you think,
wow, I'm really onto something.

Yes.
Yeah, early on.
The first hint of it wassomebody who was blind.
I did actually, I think Iput accessibility in there,
some voiceover stuff.
But I hadn't done a very good job.
Somebody who's blind contactedme and were very kind.
They gave a i a two starreview, but they contacted
me, which is the main thing.
And, really well as far as I could.
So that was initial, that was alittle bit of a wake up call that,
oh, this little fun thing I'm doingon the train, going to work every day.

(16:58):
Maybe it's actually a little bitmore meaningful than that, and
then I started to get emails andone in particular still haunts me.
Hs, not the word.
Yeah, maybe it, haunt is the rightword, but it's a guy, stage four.
Cancer veteran who's basically thankingme for being able to I interacted
with him a bit to get him to help him.
But in the end he's, he says,I have stage four cancer.
I'm gonna, what did he say?

(17:21):
Fight it or die trying or something.
I can't remember.
Anyway, it's quite poignant and and hewas using my app to control all his home
devices and he had load loads of them.
So that, that really changesthings from being a fun little
thing that's paying my lunch, andeventually it's paying my mortgage.
That really put things intoperspective that you don't know,
you know how people are going to usewhat you're doing and accessibility.
Everybody says yes, it's veryimportant, but it really is important.

(17:44):
You don't, and you never know howpeople are gonna use what you're doing.
So it's not a shouldnever be an afterthought.
It should be built infrom the beginning.
And I try to do that nowwhen I create my apps.

That's

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, no, I'm just, I'm reading on the webpage what he
said about how I'm not a whiz, butI have all these smart devices to
help me as the cancer gets worse.
So far, I have 29 smart devicesinstalled, which I can control with
my voice, iPhone, iPad, and laptop.
And now Apple Watch.
Thanks to you.
That's, yeah, that's really awesome.

I have to say I was in tears when I read that

Yeah.
Yeah.
I would imagine that would be the case.
Yeah.
It's like we always think thesethings are like little toys and then
you see somebody actually use it.
Like, why did I think of that?
That's amazing.

It was obvious that, that the people would be
using it in that kind of situation.
But at the time I didn't think of that.

Yeah.
If only sir.
Worked the same way.

Wait for Apple Intelligence, I'm

That'll fix everything.
It fix it for me.
Not for you.
'cause you're in, that's.

I'm, but not in the European Union.
I have not actually looked to see,Switzerland isn't part the European
Union, but I dunno if Apple knows that.
So we'll

Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Yeah, so it's going well.
Everything's going great.
It's all blue sky, right?
There's nothing

No.
Yeah.
Until, I think, yeah, towardsthe end of last year, I did
get an email from Amazon sayingsomething about not supporting
the Amazon Voice service going.

Okay.

And I thought, and they assured me that, or it was
a general email, but saying thatit was going to be still supported.
They'd support existing devices.
And then I started to get severalemails from different people saying
that they were getting an internalservice error from the Amazon services.
Of server when I was, when they wereusing my app, something new, and

(19:27):
at that and that point, and then Ilooked and joined off all the Amazon
Voice Service documentation was gone.
It never existed, so as far as,so all my links were broken.
And at that point I real and itwas clear, it's clear that Amazon
are refocusing, they fired a loadof people and in Amazon they've,
I think $25 billion is the wholething on the verge about it.
They spent on it and they'rereally trying to work out

(19:48):
how they're gonna make money.
And clearly my kind of appisn't their focus anymore.
It was, I visited the Amazon officesand I met some really nice people
there, so I, so there some goodtimes early on, but it's changed.
And it just, sometimes you know whatthe right thing to do is, and it just
felt like the right thing to do wasto pull it from the app store before

(20:08):
things got worse, even though it wasstill making not enough money to pay
my mortgage every month, so it wasn'tnothing but it was, but it just felt
like it was, things were only gonnaget worse and I didn't good conscience
still sell the app when I knew thatthings were probably gonna go downhill.
So I just made the decision topull the app and I felt much.

(20:28):
Afterwards you know about doing that.
I'm still getting emails from peoplenow saying, oh, you gonna bring it back?
What's happening?
But I have a form letter nowthat basically says, it just
doesn't look very likely.
If Amazon decided that they really,oh, we need Apple Watch app, they
reach out to me, I would be absolutelydelighted, to work with them.
But I just wanted to be surethat the customer experience
is as it should be and I justdon't feel right about it now.

(20:51):
Yeah.

Yeah.
It's, I wouldn't say Amazon ismore friendly than Reddit was
with Christian because they kindapretended like it never existed
weird.
But

Damian Mehers (guest): It's not really personal. (21:04):
undefined
They've not really, sorry, they've not,it's not really personal in a sense.
They don't probably,

They That's true.
The CEO doesn't lie.
And

No, exactly.
Yeah.

Yeah, that is

not been recording per, phone calls with
them and playing them back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not it's notquite the same experience.
I think I'm justunintended, casual casualty

right, exactly.
I.
It's so interesting to me thatvoice was such a big thing.
And, things haven't been great for techthis year and, there's a lot of things
that are just like getting pulled orgetting taken away and stuff like that.
It's so interesting to see Amazonbecause one of the things I remember

(21:43):
people loved about Alexa is the factthat you can build so much on top of it.
It was a lot more open.
And now it's yeah, I Do youlike, where do you see voice
assistance going forward?
Because used to be everything was echo.
Oh, the echo's amazing.
Why can't Siri be more like the Echo?
And now it's

Yes, I think, the the Amazon ecosystem is
still alive in the sense that youcan still create skills for it,
so you can still plug into the,

Yeah, that's true.
That is true.

your own, your, my, my kind of use case, creating a,
an engine that kind of use the AmazonVoice Service was a bit different,
but, yeah, I think we're all waitingto see what the impact is of the gpt.
'cause they've not really hitthe the large language models.
They've not really hit, the echo yet,although there's talk of it coming,
we're waiting for Apple intelligence.
So I think, it's a natural fit.

(22:32):
And I think it, I hesitate tosay it'll change everything, but
I think it probably will changethings just given my experience
using them for programming.
Now of course, programming is a specificuse case that's very, special and, but
I still think it's yeah, it's gonnabe a, it's gonna be interesting to
see because of the hallucinations,programming you can see on API doesn't
exist that it tells you to use.

(22:53):
Yeah, I don't actually, I don't know.
I think it's gonna be a bigchange and I suspect there's
going to be a backlash and there'sgoing to be services and apps.
Specifically, we don't useLLMs, and that's our feature.
We're just a simple, basic app thatdoesn't try to make things intelligent
that don't really need to be.
But the voice I say, I stilluse the Echoes everywhere and
the family still uses them.

(23:14):
We use them, for our shoppinglist, smart home control.
And that for me, they're definitelyin my use case, in my scenario,
they're more powerful than home kits,in terms of controlling my devices.
Yeah, I think let's see.
Ask me in a year's time, once thelanguage model, large language
models have really had their impact.

And it, do you think the apple, or excuse me, the Alexa
voice service, is that just somethingthey don't want to maintain anymore?
Or is it

N no.
I don't.
I just, I don't know for sure, butthere's a guy from Microsoft, I forget
his name off the top of my head.
He was basically left micro Microsoft.
He was head of Windows like devices.
He just joined, he joined Amazon.
It'll come to me as soon as wefinish the call, it'll come to me.
But anyway, he's clearly beengiven the remit of making money
from them and turning it intosomething, that makes money.
So I, I think that they're going to,my, my guess is that they've basically

(24:00):
been given one more shot to makemoney, so they're going to be coming,
I think they'll come along with apaid version of Alexa with which
will be using a large language model.
Yeah.
And and they'll be tryingto make money whole of.
By the way, did you knowyou could buy toilet paper?
You know that all these arethings that came back with,
it was really frustrating.
I just hear everybody complainingabout the, by the way, promise that
the Amazon, the Alexa came up with, sothat way of making money didn't work.

(24:25):
So I think they're going to tryand I think they're gonna have
one more shot of making money.
But I think the ecosystem isso big and they've sold so
many of these devices that.

Yeah.
Do you think do you think there'sa I guess we talked about it
being a future voice assistance.
You think those are just gonnahave to be attached to LLMs
of some sort, whether it'sApple Intelligence or Google

I think people are going to expect it.
They're going to expect the, themore you're not gonna be, you're not
gonna expect to have to phrase your.
Your queries in very specific ways,which you do now, you're gonna expect
it to understand, the context andthe gist and the, sometimes I'm
programming and I just say to, toJGPT I dunno, swift invert list.

(25:09):
That's all I say.
And it, automaticallygenerates, the code for me.
So it's a.
It's much more intelligent.
Although the echo, you can saythings like five minute timer.
You don't have to put all the ceremonyof, please set up blah, blah, blah.
It'll work.
But but I think the gp, the languagemodels are gonna change how we
interact with those assistants.
I think.

Do you have the slightest desire to jump back
in and do anything with Alexa?
Programming

No.
I've moved on new shiny things, Ijumped onto it when it was a new
thing and I created a skill to let younotes to a note and one, one note, and
I, I created voice, but I feel likepsychologically I've moved on now.
Sometimes when I look back at all thatcode I wrote for this, for that for
the engine and for PAing, the APL L andthen generating ui, it's all managed.

(25:59):
I should probably opensource it or something.
But I do have a tinge of nostalgia,but I think I'm the downside, is
closing the app and losing the revenue.
I enjoyed interacting with peoplewho, had questions about it, but
the upside is I free up all mymind, the opportunity cost of.

What before we jump onto what you're working on
next, what kinda is your processof shutting down the app per se?
Exactly.

I have actually shut it down in two ways.
Early on or earlier on when I moved tousing Swift, I shut down the Samsung
app, which was a, which was popular.
I had a discord group, withpeople chatting about it.
I was having sales every day.
But I shut that down and I expectedit to be the same as as Apple, which
was, it would still be there for peoplethat already bought it, but, oh no, it

(26:50):
would just disappear from the store.
And if you bought itbefore, you're outta luck.
So that experience was toughbecause I had to tell these
people, I'm sorry, there's nothingI can do with the Apple one.
So far it's been pretty smooth.
I like the fact that Apple leave,
so I basically flip a switch.
Double checking everything inthe store, and and off it went.
And then I had to update the websiteand to, to explain what had happened.

(27:13):
But it's been, so far,it's been pretty good.
I'm waiting for the other shoe todrop in that dunno what's gonna, I
expect at some point it will bakefor existing customers and, and then
basically, that's what I'm gonna get.
The angry emails.
People can't leave one store,one star reviews anymore
because the store's closed.

Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So what are you, what'sthe plan now going forward?

Yeah, I think I said I was working, I was, I'm 57 years
old and I've got all this legacy stuff,services I've used, over the last, I
don't know, 20, 30 years from emails,from the 1990s eGroup, which got bought
by Yahoo and turned into Yahoo Groups.
I have all these things, these exports.
So what I wanted to do wascreate a integrated on.

(28:03):
Tens of different services, whetherit be Twitter or Facebook or
LinkedIn or email, or pretty muchany service you can imagine, although
the only service that I've usedin the past last fm, you name it.
And they integrated all, suck itall in and show it in an integrated
search timeline so that I couldgo back on my Apple photos, my
WhatsApp messages so I can go back.

(28:24):
I made in the, with afamily, I dunno, in.
12 and I can see the places Iwas at because I'm importing
my Google location history.
I can see the emails Isent around that time.
I can see the Facebook posts.
I made the apple photos that I have allthe integrated, searchable timeline.
So it gives me a way of basically seeingmy line, my digital life integrated.

(28:49):
On device.
No, no cloud component.
And and I, and it's my data, so whyshouldn't I be able to own it and
search it, so I can see I'm, so thereal scenario is I'm connected to
someone on LinkedIn and so I searchin my app for that person's name,
and I can see the emails I sent theconference we're at the same time.
All this stuff.

(29:11):
I'm not sure I'm gonna release it.
I don't, I dunno for sure.
I, it's in test flight at the moment.
I'm still in two minds.
As to whether or not to releaseit because there is a massive, I
don't, massive is the right word,but a significant mental cost to
releasing and supporting an app.
It's not free.
Even if the app was free, which itprobably won't be I'll, there's still

(29:31):
the support emails and so on and

How about like open sourcing parts of it,

That's true.
That's a possibility.
Yeah
It's.
Yeah, you, it's a responsibility,to, to release something.
And I wanna be sure that it'ssomething I really want to do.
I've got, I know, just under a hundredtest flight users, but yeah, so we'll
see if I actually release it or not.
But the test

the name of it?

available, it's, so the name is closed ppl.
ODI means absolutely nothing.
It's just one of those.
Domains that we all have, that we dunnowhy we registered them, but we have it.
And so pz e.com, you can see a video,you can download the test flight
and I'll be absolutely delighted toget any feedback anybody has about

Awesome.
We'll put a link in theshow notes for folks.

I am thinking about plugging in a local
large language model as well, so

I was about to ask that.
Yeah.
That's the next thing

yeah.
Having said all that stuff aboutthe feature being not no, LM

You know when you leave this world that way people can talk
to you even when you're dead, right?

Yeah.
But also, yeah, no, I think I, I,somebody from my family my father,
passed away recently, and I, it doesthink, strike me that it would be a
good way to, to be able to pull togethersomeone's legacy, and put it in and
have all of his emails and photosand, all the stuff in one place that

Have you ever read those stories about people who,
like they import the emails andtext messages to their late partner
or whatever, and then it gets

Discover things I didn't want to know.

Yeah.
Yeah.
It's

no, there was the Black Mirror episode

there's a black, but it's been done in real life.
Not as, not like buying a robot oranything, you're not getting whatever.
Yeah.
Your boyfriend back ordered fromAmazon or anything, but there is LLI,
there's article, there's been articlesI've read about, girlfriends talking
to their dead boyfriend 'cause they

That's not something I'm interested in, but
I'm interested in being able toquery it, but you, but because the
quantity of data is so massive.
It's gigabytes.
Because email, my email, myGmail archive is 30 gigabytes.
I would've to use retrievalaugmented generation to, to, to
put, do a local search, to pullin useful information and then do
the LLM query on that, because.
Unless the context window getsenormous, I'm not gonna be able to to

(31:39):
have all of the data in the context.
So it is something I'm thinkingabout, but yeah, we'll see.

Oh yeah.
That's gonna be athing, that's gonna be a

Yeah.
I suspect so.

If there's a VC that's willing to spend
money on it, it'll be there.
Yeah, that's a,

as as

Go ahead.

I just remember, Phil Lib in the former avenue, CEO, was
saying, people offering crazy amountsof money forever night, but then you
end up with a crazy amount of money.
Crazy guy on the or lady on theboard, and so it is the same with
this, VCs, if they offer got ofcrazy money, you maybe you've gotta,
you're dealing with a crazy person.

Yeah, exactly.
Anything else you wanna talkabout Damien, before we close out?

one, one final thing I would just say, and this is
people creating apps in general andalso people who are using apps, is
it's really easy to get upset withcustomer the app developer and then
return with the with the customer.
And, the one star review wouldleave zero stars if I could,
I wrote a blog about it andI think you really, it kind.
To try and put yourself in the shoesof the person, empath empathic with

(32:44):
the person you're dealing with, andassume the best, so even if you get
the horrible email from the personwanting all the review, be kind,
assume the best and try and help them.
You never know what'sgoing on in their lives.
And I've had cases where, one starreview has turned into a five star
review, and those people are themost rabid or rabid, I should say

(33:04):
supporters of your app once they flipover, so anyway I would just say try
to be kind, to when you're respondingto reviews, even if you really are
angry, which we've all been, and upset.
Yeah.

Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
Damien, thank you so much for coming on.
Where can people find you online?

Yeah.
Damian, FAYF yi, sorry, D-A-M-I-N fyi.
That has all my my links toeverything so yeah, Damian.
Yep.

and we'll put that in the show notes as well.
People can find me onTwitter at Leo g Dion.
My company is Bright Digit.
Leo g Dion at C am is my Ma on.
Thank you for joining me andI look forward to talking
to you in the next episode.
Bye everybody.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Voice in a Can with Damian Mehers