 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Comcast Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. Very cool facility right off the runway from Moffitt. They got a ton of cool toys downstairs. We'll try to get to go play with, which I'm looking forward to. But today, the conversation was all about CX, customer experience. And Comcast is there. A lot of people like to watch their TVs, interacting with their cable systems for a long, long time. But there's a whole range of new and innovative things that are coming out from Comcast. And we're excited to have an engineer who's kind of down in the bowels here in the engine room building all this stuff. So I'd like to welcome Mike Fine. He's a cable software architect for Comcast. Mike, great to see you. Mike Wise. So you had a really cool demo earlier, which is not a demo, right? I think this thing is down in production. It's called the X1 iControl. I think most people know what X1 is. What's X1 iControl? Yeah, X1 iControl is a web application that integrates with off the shelf accessibility hardware. So that could be a Tobi iGaze rig. It could be something called a Sip and Puff, which lets users use their inhalation and exhalation to control the application. Or any other off the shelf accessibility hardware that can mimic a mouse to a piece of software. Two. Yeah, the goal of the project was pretty simple. It was to let people with ALS and other conditions control their TVs independently. That's amazing. And you showed a great video. The gentleman on the video is using, I think an iGaze method, but you said you've got integrations to a number of different kind of ADA approved interface devices. That's right. The journey that this project has taken has been interesting. We started with just the ALS use case, which was the iGaze, but it turned out that one of our early users had control over his voice, which is somewhat unusual for ALS patients. And so he asked whether he could control it with his voice. So we did that work through, he had dragon naturally speaking, which was nice, so we did that work. And then of course, given that we have the voice remote, we decided could we make voice work for everybody, which we did, so now the application is on par with the physical remote. And then we even went further and let people type in voice commands, so in case somebody was perhaps mute or had a speech impediment or some sort of speech pathology issue that prevented them from using their voice, they could do that as well. It's really interesting. I mean, you guys have so many kind of interface points to an ecosystem broader than simply what's available at Comcast, whether it's on the front end, as you said, with some of these interfaces with ADA devices or on the back end, if I want to watch my Netflix or I want to watch YouTube or I want to watch a different service. You guys have really taken kind of an open integrated approach to all these, one might argue, competitive threats to really bring it in as the customer wants to experience. Why did you do that? What's kind of the philosophy driving that? Yeah, well, the first thought that comes to mind is that none of it's possible without the right cloud APIs. So somebody very visionary years ago made the decision that everything you can do on your TV or on the mobile app you can do through the cloud. And so a project like this couldn't happen unless it was possible for a piece of software that somebody invented well after the fact to cause a TV to change channels unless there was that underpinning. So like any other piece of software, it's a bit of an iceberg. There's a lot of stuff underneath that you don't realize as a user, but it's there and that's what makes it possible. I'm just curious about some of the challenges in terms of moving UI and UX forward into places that people are not familiar with. And I've joked about it on a number of these interviews that I still get an email, not only from Comcast, but from Google and from Alexa suggesting to me ways in which I might use voice. As you sit back from a technologist, what are some of the challenges you guys kind of anticipate? What are some of the ones you didn't anticipate and how do you help us old people find new ways to interact with the technology? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, there's a lot of us here that spend our days solving that exact problem, right? Part of it is notifying you of interesting things through SMS or through mobile push or the messages on the TV. So your team is playing in a game that you want to see a movie that you've declared interested in has become cheaper or become free or maybe even viable if you wanted to do that. Obviously there's lots of AI and ML in terms of putting recommendations in front of you based on your viewing habits, based on broader trends because you watch this, other people watch this, so we know this is probably a good solution for you as well. But yeah, there's a large number of us trying to optimize what we call time to joy from the time you pick up your remote to think about what you want to watch to the time you're actually watching something you want to watch, make that as seamless as possible. And then Preston said, you guys get like a billion voice commands, what was the period of time? A month. So obviously a big giant new data set for you guys now to have at your disposal. What are some of the things that you're learning from that inbound? What can you do with it? How do you now use this direct touch with the customer to again kind of recycle and have another iteration on improved experience? So voice is a lot like a text chat, like a bot interface in that it's an experience where users are telling you exactly what they want to do. So if a user sits in front of a traditional web application or mobile application and has trouble finding what they want to do, they can't figure out what button to press, what screen to go to. You have no idea, right? You can't infer that they're having a problem. But with voice or somebody interacting with a bot, they type exactly what they mean or they say exactly what they mean. So we can mine those voice commands and find the popular ones that we don't at that point have implemented. And if we can iterate on that cycle fast enough, we can quickly introduce new voice commands that our users are literally asking for as quickly as possible. Right. What about the stuff that customers are not asking for? Because there's one line of thought which is the customer knows best, but the customer doesn't know what they don't know. So how do you guys continue to look for more kind of cutting edge stuff that isn't necessarily coming back through a feedback loop? Right. Yeah, so it's an interesting question. So we're trying to add other non-TV use cases into the mix, right? So controlling your IoT devices at home, controlling your security, seeing your cameras through the set-top box and so on. So until those use cases exist, nobody's asking for them. And so you do have to be a bit visionary in terms of what you want to put out there as voice commands. Luckily, we have people who, well, we're all customers of the platform generally, so we know what it means to be a user. But we have people that talk with users and have a general sense of what they want to do. And then we figure out what the right commands are. Right. Not voice specifically, but let's unpack a little bit deeper into the impact of IoT. Nest probably was the first kind of broadly accepted kind of IoT device in the home. And now you got Ring, which everybody loves to take pictures of people stealing their boxes from the front porch. But that puts you guys with the internet connectivity in a very different place than simply providing a football game or the entertainment. So as you think of your role changing in the house, specifically with now these connected devices, how do you think about the new opportunities, new challenges that being the person in the middle of that is different than just sending a TV signal? Yeah, there's a lot of talk about trying to be the home OS. Certainly, we're in a unique position being in the home, both in terms of the router and the internet, but also often, frankly, when your system is set up, a human being came in and helps you understand how to best position the physical devices in your house and so on. That other companies don't have, right? Those vendors just don't have that built-in advantage. Clearly, security has become a big thing for us. Home automation, I sit very close to that group. They're doing amazing things with automating rules like tell me when my door's been open too long and these sort of things. And so more and more of these cases start to converge that, for example, when you say good morning, we have this idea of scenes. So when your morning starts, you not only want to tune the TV, but you also want to crank up the lights and unlock the door and open the windows or whatever. And when you go to bed, so the actions that are involved in those use cases span not just TV and not just internet, but all of it. Right, it's just funny, because I don't think Comcast would be the first name that people would say when they're talking about voice technology and the transformational impact of voice technology, probably going to say Siri was the first and Alexa's probably the most popular and Google's got Lord knows how many inputs they have, but you guys are really sitting in a central place and I would might argue it's one of the more used voice applications out there. So from kind of a technology leadership perspective, you guys have a bunch of really unique assets in terms of where you are, what you control, what you're sitting on in terms of that internet. How does that really help you and the team think about Comcast as an innovation company, Comcast as a cool tech company, not necessarily Comcast as what used to be just a cable company. Right, right. Well, as somebody in the valley with friends in the valley, it's always interesting to try to differentiate reality from the view that many people have. This is definitely much more than your dad's cable company, it's a consumer electronic company as much as anything else. We very much position ourselves with the Fang companies, et cetera. So when we talked about CX, it's no longer the case that whatever is passable for a stodgy cable company passes the CX anymore, now you're being compared to a set of customers, the companies that are providing fantastic user experiences for their customers and you're being held to that standard. So there's a lot of pressure on us, which is great, we like that, we want to produce fantastic products. And yeah, I don't know if I have a great answer in terms of how to move forward, in terms of melding it all together, but we have a lot of smart people in the hallways making that happen. So last question, it's really the impact of AI, because we cover a lot of tech events and a lot of talk about AI, but I think those of us around know that really where AI shines is applied AI in specific applications for specific U-cases. So how are you guys kind of implementing AI, where are some of the opportunities that you see that you can do in the future that you couldn't do the past, whether it be just with much better data sets, whether it be with much faster connectivity and a much better compute, so that you can ultimately deliver a better customer experience using some of these really modern tools. Right, so some of the work is just making what you already do or experience better. So for example, showing you recommendations, just make that algorithm better. And so there's a great deal of effort as you might expect at a company like this on that problem. But there's also work being done to just take any interactivity between you and the system out of the picture completely. We talked a little bit about this earlier that for example, we're working on technology that when you turn your TV on in the morning, it should probably tune to the channel that you normally tune to in the morning. That's a pretty simple problem in a sense, but if I watch your viewing patterns and I see that you turn on a particular new show in the morning, why should you have to pick up the remote and change it from what you watched on it for to that channel, it should just happen. We talked about the smart resume stuff, that's obviously a fantastic use case for end users. So it's not surprising it's being used all over the technology set. It's in the home automation world. It's in A-B testing, so trying to figure out the right cohorts to try different things in front of. So it's everywhere, as you would expect. Right, right. It's pretty amazing. I mean, there's just so many things going on kind of under the covers, some that we can see, some that we can't see that where you guys are really kind of progressing kind of the leading edge, cutting edge customer experience with something that people interact with every single day. That's right. Yeah, cool stuff. Thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the iControl, really a cool story and look forward to more publicity around that because that's a really important piece of technology. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. All right, he's Mike, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.