Episode #31: Voice Automation with Serverless with Aleksandar Simovic

About Aleksandar Simovic

Aleksandar is an AWS Serverless Hero and an experienced senior software engineer at Science Exchange, a biotech company based in Palo Alto, California, that is helping scientists, research laboratories and big pharma companies get faster in experimentation and research. Co-author of “Serverless Applications with Node.js” book, published by Manning Publications. He is based in Belgrade and co-organizer of JS Belgrade, Map Meetup Belgrade and Serverless Belgrade. One of the core team members of Claudia.js, contributor to AWS SAM, AWS CDK, AWS Lambda Builders and many other open source libraries.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you are listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Aleksandar Simovic. Hi, Aleksandar. Thanks for joining me.

Aleksandar: Hi, Jeremy. Thank you for having me. It's awesome to be here.

Jeremy: You are a senior software engineer at Science Exchange, plus you're also an AWS Serverless hero. Why don't you explain to the listeners a little about yourself and what you've been doing at Science Exchange.

Aleksandar: Yup. You're right. I'm a senior software engineer at Science Exchange doing serverless a bit more than four years at the moment. Yeah, there's a lot of titles here, AWS Serverless Hero, where I work with other two serverless heroes, Gojko and Slobodan on Claudia.js, one of the first frameworks for serverless. Also co-authored a book, Serverless Applications with Node.js with Slobodan, running many meet-ups on JavaScript serverless Wardley Maps scene, Belgrade Serbia. My main focus is serverless, and business strategy, basically building product with serverless and Wardley Maps.

Jeremy: Awesome, all right, so I want to talk to you about something today that maybe is not going to seem like it's about serverless, but I think you and I will agree that it very much so is. That has to do with voice automation or the ability to use voice integration, I'm sorry, voice interface technology. I think that the ability to control something with your voice is absolutely the future of how pretty much most interactions are going to go. Maybe I'm a little bit crazy here, but I think you sort of agree with me?

Aleksandar: Yeah, this is something that there's a lot of heated discussion about, but I'm going to just tell you a story of this Christmas I saw my seven-year-old nephew, who basically doesn't ... He's Serbian. He doesn't know English. He doesn't know how to type properly. He doesn't know the Latin letters. I saw him using the phone in a very different way than we used to use it. He basically started ... He only uses the phone by using the Google Voice function, so he opens up the phone and he just presses the Google search function and he basically just says what he wants without even typing or anything.

For him, that was the most easy way to interact with technology. And that's something which blew my mind as I saw that the way we are interacting with technology has evolved so much that in our age we sort of ... We started tapping on the iPhones and everything, and now we have a new kind of age slowly creeping in using voice.

What's surprising is that for many humans that are not used to phones, are not used to the traditional ways of using technology, voice has become something as a normal thing, something very ordinary.

Jeremy: Yeah, and promised the listeners we're going to get to why serverless is important here, but I want to just quickly start with ... just sort of lay this out, like lay out the groundwork here and what we mean by voice interface technology. When we started with visual interfaces we were using desktops or computers, and then everything started shifting to mobile, and companies started thinking mobile first. Now there's this thing, sort of voice first, right?

Aleksandar: Yeah.

Jeremy: We've seen this with Alexa and Google Home and Siri and some of these other things. It started very simple, where we were saying like "Oh, Alexa play this song." Or, "Alexa set a time," or things like that, and I hope people aren't playing this over the speakers so that their Alexa devices are going crazy. I should say, "Alex, order a 100 rolls of toilet paper." But these sort of interfaces now have become much more sophisticated.

The technology's much more sophisticated, and now people can do very, very complex things. I want to get into that in a minute, but when I think about voice interaction or this idea of using your voice to control different systems, and of course this home automation and all this kind of stuff, this was sort of predictable right?

Aleksandar: Yeah, so voice ... As you can see, everything that we are ... in technology everything evolves, and everything evolves so fast, and how do we ... The main issue that we have is how do we anticipate change. How do we anticipate what's going to happen? Luckily, maybe around 15 years ago, I know something called Wardley Maps has appeared, some kind of strategic maps developed by Simon Wardley, one researcher at ... one amazing, actually, researcher, and a former CEO. He discovered this way of how can you actually anticipate change and have a situational awareness of how things are going and evolving. Many of your serverless listeners already heard about him, but he basically created this concept called Wardley Maps, which kind of represent the strategic maps of a business landscape.

Which are kind of represented in a form of a value chain of components, which evolved over time. Now that doesn't sound very, like, novel, for some people maybe, I don't know, but basically he created a very visual map, visual way of mapping business surrounding. Based on that, you're able to anticipate how things are going to evolve. For example, we know about the electricity, how electricity was something novel, new, unknown, coming to a point where it's commoditized, industrialized. I mean all of our common lives are kind of pointless without electricity at the moment.

Our technology and the things we do are pointless without it. And as these things, as Simon developed this amazing mapping technique, and basically a structure about our own strategy, he found out different things that were going on. For example, that as new things appear, as things become commoditized, sorry, they become ... you are able to build some things on top of them. We can see that with our electricity we got radio. We got television and we got computers, internet, and we came here to serverless.

So, basically, what happened, I mean what Simon saw 15 years ago, is that there's going to be a ... He actually even created the first serverless technology in his company, and he basically, 15 years ago, he said there's going to be something, such as AWS Lambda. There is going to be something where you're going to have a runtime, a runtime as a commodity, where you won't have to think about servers, where you won't have to think about infrastructure, so basically he developed a way how do you anticipate change and how do ...