At 8:15 AM I called Safelite Auto Glass for a quote to fix a chip in my car’s windshield. I wasn’t expecting to get the work done today, but the customer service rep gave me a great deal. We scheduled the appointment for 9:30 AM. Then he asked if he could send me an email confirmation.
Normally I don’t give out my email address because I don’t want to get on another mailing list. However, in my past experience there’s been miscommunication between the corporate call center and the place of service. In truth, the $50 Safelite quote was way below the $140 dealer quote I got the day before. An email confirmation of the quote would clear up any issues should they arise. So I obliged.
What I usually do next is put the appointment in my calendar. It’s a habit I tried very hard to make over the years. No matter how soon the appointment is put it in the calendar to remember to do it!
A funny thing happened when I opened my calendar. There was an event there that said Repair your WINDSHIELD already. It had the proper time and everything.
Took me a minute to realize what had happened. The email confirmation was sent to my personal email. I use Google’s Gmail.
Turns out Google made a calendar event based on the information in that email. I use Google Calendar too. Gmail + Calendar + Google stuff was able to parse the proper event name, the time, and the location.
Then at 8:50 AM, my phone buzzed. A notification told me to leave by 9:07 AM because there is heavy traffic on the way there. I even got driving directions. By the way, there’s always heavy traffic in Chicago.
By 10:30 AM I left the Safelite shop with a repaired windshield.
I felt like I had a personal assistant this morning. I had a glimpse of artificial intelligence, but not once did I feel like I was in a sci-fi movie.
The coolest thing about my “personal assistant” experience is that it didn’t require sci-fi technology. It was amazing for sure, but I didn’t call out to Siri or ask my non-existent robot butler. It all started with a simple low tech thing: email.
Jim
on 20 Nov 14Ha. Another reason back to Android :)
Nils
on 20 Nov 14I had a similar experience today: I asked my phone “OK Google, call doctor ”.
I actually did it as a test: I knew I didn’t have the name in my list of contacts and knew the Google results for the doctor were mediocre.
Nevertheless, 2 seconds later it was calling the correct number automatically.
Heading out to google something on a smartphone still feels like a chore so this was a truly revelating experience to deal with it with just one simple spoken sentence.
Jiawei
on 20 Nov 14I always want some perfect experience in using technology just like yours. I think your smooth experience is based on the device you use, the network condition, and your habit. If the thing happened on me, it would not be like this. Sometimes, I feel very unsure and nervous using Google Calendar to sync iCal.
But I couldn’t agree more that “simple low tech thing” can also be very powerful if it is customer centred designed. Sometimes, good design could make hard things simple.
Anton
on 21 Nov 14Good story, but the fact that email has been around for a while does not make it “low-tech”.
Michael
on 21 Nov 14A better description than “artificial intelligence” is “functional integration”. Google isn’t doing anything that a 3rd party plug-in couldn’t do. The innovation here is that they’re building in functional integration across their product suite. The intelligence is not new.
Arnodmental
on 21 Nov 14just wondering if there was some sort of microformat included in the confirmation email. Have you checked the source ? If so I will definitely have a closer look on this !
Devan
on 22 Nov 14Three questions come to mind Jamie… (1) Are you using the new Google Inbox service? (2) Was there an iCal file attached to the confirmation email that GMail could have picked up and parsed? (3) What instrument do you play in the Ruby Band? ;)
Umesh
on 24 Nov 14Hey Jamie, just wanted to know if the email confirmation from Safelite contain a calendar event file. From the look of it I don’t think they support schema.org. I haven’t seen Google doing this without either of the above in place.
Umesh
This discussion is closed.