Pebble’s New Core Competency is Alexa

The keychain computer will have Amazon’s assistant. But Pebble first tested human concierges doing “anything that’s legal” for users

Last week the smart watch company Pebble announced a Kickstarter campaign for a new device that has no watch face and lives on your key ring. While optimized for exercise (it streams Spotify and quantifies your run) the Pebble Core also can be retooled easily to perform a variety of different functions, limited only by the apps that developers might imagine. Buried in the company’s Kickstarter pitch was one of those ideas : “Add a Bluetooth or wired headset to create an always-on walkie-talkie or personal voice assistant.”

The italics are mine, but today Pebble itself is boldfacing those last few words, by announcing that the Core will integrate the capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa super-bot.

In retrospect it’s kind of obvious. Pebble has been upfront about its broad vision for the Core, and while its pocket gadget has no microphone, a simple mobile-phone earbud or Bluetooth headset enables two way voice interaction. And Amazon is the logical choice for the first partner. So far Alexa — an ecstatically reviewed voice portal to “skills” like buying stuff on Amazon, reporting the weather, buying stuff on Amazon, tracking baseball scores, playing music, and (did I mention?) buying stuff on Amazon — has been closely associated with home-grown devices like Echo or Dot. But the company has been vocal about opening its API’s so other devices will speak with Alexa’s voice. Since Pebble is one of the most popular wearables on the market, its announcement carries some weight, and when it ships next January, will be among the first body computers on the market to integrate Alexa. (Right now, the only third-party device using the Alexa Voice Service is a kitchen-based display called Triby. According to Amazon, Ford is considering integrating Alexa in cars and another smart-watch company, Co-Watch, is planning to build the bot into its product.)

As for Pebble, it turns out that adopting Alexa is an evolution of a preexisting strategy. Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, who is 30, has been obsessed with the potential of wearables since he founded what is now Pebble in 2008. He understood, years prior to Apple entering the field, that only imagination bounded what such devices could do for you. Given that, it’s not surprising that well before working on the Amazon integration, Pebble has been working to imbue its products with the superpowers of a omnipotent assistant-bot.

The proof is an elaborate project it operated in the second half of 2015 and early this year. It was a test of the Pebble platform as a means for users to get anything they wanted, simply by talking to the device. They called it Concierge. (Though in keeping with the company policy of Tintin-related code names, it was secretly dubbed “Project at No. 26,” a reference to the protagonist’s flat at No. 26 Labrador Road.) Pebble recently shared the details with me, its first public acknowledgement of the project.

Migicovsky says there were two reasons to try the experiment. “One, part of the future of Pebble is discovering how people will seamlessly include technology on our bodies and in our lives,” he says. The other was specifically to take a deep look at how a voice interface could enhance the wearable experience. How a wearable performs in those experiments, of course, is of interest not only to Pebble but to all us, as humanity seems poised to go down the path of cyborg-ism.

Because the point of the project was the interaction itself, Pebble didn’t build Concierge around a fancy natural language system. The commands, spoken to the tester’s Pebble watch, were interpreted and executed old-school style — by real people. Though this has obvious scaling limitations, the human touch is a good assurance that things will get done without goofy misunderstandings; Facebook’s beta effort in AI-based virtual assistants, M, uses trained service employees to complete tricky tasks and train the algorithms to do better. Pebble’s idea was to eliminate the fuzziness that still exists in artificial systems and allow Pebble to peek around a temporal corner and see what it would be like if such systems just worked.

In fact, in the first iteration of the system, even the simple act of translating voice commands to text was too unwieldy. For instance, the system kept hearing “pizza coffee” when the user was actually demanding a cup of Peet’s Coffee. As explained by Ben Bryant, Pebble’s head of special projects, the Concierge team solved that problem by an extra step. In addition to the text-to-digital, the four full-time flesh-and-blood functionaries had access to the actual audio sound bites of the request. Comprehension was “100 percent guaranteed,” says Bryant.

The first testers were a few lucky Pebble employees. “It was kind of a perk,” says Migicovsky. “The really cool thing was that it could literally do everything compared to a lot of the other services that are limited. They would go and get you a coffee or a sandwich. I also had them move my car when parking expired, reschedule flights, and get tickets to concerts.” (In case you’re wondering, Concierge did not get Migicovsky tickets to “Hamilton.” He tried, of course.)

To get a broader range of behaviors, Pebble opened the test project to carefully chosen outsiders, trying to find people who had a lot to do, no spare time to do it in, and, whose hands were usually occupied. A bike courier. A Y Combinator CEO. One of the most compulsive users was Wes Whitehead, the head chef of an LA catering operation.

“We would do anything you wanted us to do, provided it wasn’t illegal,” says Bryant. During the day, Concierge was fully staffed from 7 am to 6 pm. After hours, the concierges still handled requests, even late into the night, via their cell phones. People put up a table for sale on Craigslist, looked for hot springs outside Tahoe, sent flowers to a user’s mother in Taiwan, bought an avocado, and booked lots of plane tickets. When one tester came across a wounded cormorant on the beach, Concierge helped locate an animal rescue service. The weirdest request, in Bryant’s view, was an order for ten pounds of mung bean sprouts.

This past January, though, Pebble closed the Concierge desk. The company says that it needed to focus on preparing its new products (in addition to the Core, it introduced two new watches) for the Kickstarter announcement. Also, since the company was preparing to lay off a quarter of its workforce, the idea of having a squad of full time employees acting as in-house task rabbits became ludicrously untenable. So Pebble stopped taking requests, disappointing some of its testers. Even though it gave the early users a couple of weeks notice, the LA chef stopped using it immediately, so he wouldn’t have to face the dark day when his voice commands went unheeded. “I’ve become dependent on the system,” he told Bryant.

Pebble learned a lot from the project, including one counterintuitive datum that raises questions about the future of intelligent assistants. “We didn’t see as much usage as we wanted to,” Migicovsky says. “I mean this was a free service. People were getting an entire assistant for free! We thought it should be used much, much more.” He still doesn’t fully understand why. One possible reason was the built in latency that comes from human beings being not as quick as computers. You would ask Concierge a question, and the Pebble employee on the other end would have to look it up online or on an app. It wasn’t instant, like Google Now, Hound or Alexa. “I was complaining that I couldn’t find out what the weather was in a minute or something,” says Migicovsky. “Talk about first world problems!

Meanwhile, the company was working on the Pebble Core, and there for the taking was a highly regarded automated assistant: Alexa. It was a perfect shortcut to outfit its new device with an intelligent assistant. (Maybe not as intelligent as a human, but it can report the weather much faster!) Amazon promises to make it easy for developers like Pebble to adopt its open API, the Alexa Voice Service. The certification process is much like that of Apple’s App Store, explains Amazon spokesperson Brittany Turner. It’s a short process of checking to see if the implementation and the hardware is up to snuff.

You could argue that the deal is better for Amazon than it is for Pebble: Jeff Bezos’ company gets a broader adoption of a service built, among other things, to enable people to impulse-buy items from the company’s cosmically vast inventory. Pebble doesn’t get a dime from that. But adding Alexa does make its $99 screenless Core (sorry, the $69 Kickstarter units are all gone) more useful, enabling users to invoke the 980 (and counting) “skills” written for Alexa. Undoubtedly, some people addicted to their Echoes will consider buying a Pebble Core to engage in Alexa interactions wherever they go.

Pebble’s adoption of Alexa may not be a major milestone in the increasingly competitive intelligent assistant war, but it shows how Amazon, without a popular operating system of its own, can propagate its bot into the hardware topology of the Internet of Things. Apple and Google are making it easy for Amazon by keeping their system relatively closed. (After Google announced its Echo competitor Google Home, Migicovsky marveled at its lack of an open API for devicemakers like him.)

For users, the story may not be as rosy. Why shouldn’t the devices of our choice have the bots we prefer? Maybe gadgets in the future could accommodate a gaggle of automated assistants, all poised to answer the call when the proper trigger word is uttered — OK Google!, Hey, Siri! Viv, are you with me? (Privacy advocates may shudder at the prospect of multiple services open-miking us, but that’s another story.)

As for now, Migicovsky is grateful that Alexa offered a graceful pivot from the secret Concierge project. “It’s very well aligned with the Pebble philosophy,” he says, taking pains to specify that the whole thing is still experimental. “I am cautious and I’m optimistic,” he says. “I love Alexa in the house. But we’re still going learn a lot about what it’s like to have a virtual assistant with you.”

Pebble’s Ben Bryant seems optimistic and less cautious. “This is where the future is headed in terms of interface,” he says. “Message chatbots!”

One difference from Concierge: humans need not apply.