 Hello everybody, I'm Greg Davis from Iowa State University, and Lisa. I'm Lisa Smith from Iowa State University. So we're going to tell you a little bit about a project we've been working on called Parks Libro. And so my part of the presentation is I get to do the basic PowerPoint slide deck. And then Lisa gets to do the live demo here in a hotel room we've never been in before with beta software. So you can decide who got the better deal here. But we've got our fingers crossed and it's going to go good. So here we go. So Carl already talked a lot about what, here's what we're doing today's presentation. Carl already talked about the things happening around us out there in the world with smart assistants and reasons why we might want to be thinking about doing them here in our academic library. In my slide deck I've got like four or five slides worth of these industry statistics. And I posted our slides up to the sked site for the CNI meeting. So if you want to get the stats, you find them there, but I'm not going to take a lot of time today to talk about the stats. Just like Carl indicated, there's just lots of motivating factors out there that I think would make academic libraries want to think about smart assistants and how they might play into our world. So yeah, so for us at Iowa State, this was probably a couple of years ago, we started to look at these industry statistics and we decided, well, it's probably going to happen. You know, it's not really a question of when it's going to happen. It's just, I mean, it is a question of when it's not if. And so we wanted to start thinking about, well, how are we going to think about that? And so we thought about it, we tried to think about it from a strategic planning point of view. You know, how can we be strategic about this? And a couple, again, a couple of years ago when we got started with the smart assistant project, it was, you were sitting there thinking, you know, sooner or later, the vendors are going to start putting this stuff into the product. And it might be bundled in around the box or it might be something you have to pay extra for, but, you know, sooner or later, this is going to happen. It just has to. So why would we want to go through the pain and suffering of developing something ourselves only in who knows how long before it just comes out of the box and we can throw our other stuff away? So we thought about that, you know, do we really want to try to do some things to experiment with this? And we decided, yeah, well, let's take a shot at it. At least we'll learn about what the technology is about and how it works and just gain a better understanding of the technology. Even if vendors come along eventually and replace what we did with something better, that's a good thing. At least we'll be a step ahead and know more about what's happening with this type of technology. And in fact, just what has recently happened is here at Iowa State, we are an ex Libris customer. We use Alma and Primo and I think in the next quarterly release of Primo, which I think is this month, they're going to add a microphone to the Primo Search box and so you can click on the microphone and type in your search or voice your search request and it will do the translation and do your Primo Search for you. So that's not necessarily a true voice assistant, but it's a step in that direction. And so you can see that some of these technologies are starting to make their way into the off the shelf product. So what we did at Iowa State, instead of creating a team of developers like Carl did at Oklahoma, we decided to look outside the University and see would there be a development partner out there that we could work with to do our experiment. And it turned out that, well, there's probably more than one, but we found at least one out there. It was a company called Kovner site. Yeah, Kovner site. And they had a product in the public library sector called Libro. And so we talked to them and said, hey, would you be interested in working with us to adapt your Libro project, your product to work in academic libraries? And they were willing to work with us. And so we signed the contract and for a couple years now we've been working with this company to develop the Libro product. And actually what we did, each version of Libro is specific to the library it's working in. So at Iowa State University, our library is Parks Library. And so we branded our Libro product as Parks Libro. And so you'll see in the demo that we'll be asking Parks Libro questions. That's the version of Libro that's specific to the Iowa State University library. So we've gone through a couple of phases. So phase one of our project was really focused on Amazon Alexa. And we had concerns right from the start about sharing personal information and we had concerns about what's Amazon going to do with information when we capture it in their cloud and all those things. And so we sort of drew a line and said our first version of the app is not going to use any personal information, which is a good thing but also it limits what the app can do. It can't tell you what books you have checked out because it doesn't know who the heck you are. So about the best it can do is it can do a search and tell you what books the library has but it can't check it out to you because again it doesn't know who you are. So we're not sharing personal information. So that's a good thing in terms of not sharing PII stuff but also limited what the app could do. But it was a really good starting point and again it was a skill that we developed in the Amazon store and it was out there that anyone could implement the skill in Alexa and use the skill to search the Iowa State catalog. And like Carl said we're using APIs and so the Libro app is using the Primo APIs to do the Primo searches. We also connected it to our LibCal product, our SpringShare LibCal and so you can use the SpringShare APIs to search for events and you can search for library hours. And so those were the kinds of searches we set up in the first phase of our project. Again none of it required personal information. Then phase two which is currently what we would call ourselves currently in phase two. We advanced the product in terms of trying to find ways that we could actually do more of it even though it required the ability for people to log in and share who they were as they came into the smart assistant. And the way we decided to handle that is that we had our developer actually create a mobile app wrapper that sort of wraps around Amazon Alexa. And so we're still using Amazon Alexa but what happens is our mobile app is the interface and so you enter your query into our mobile app and then the mobile app captures that and creates a package that sends to Amazon Alexa and then Alexa does the voice language translation and sends back the request to the mobile app and then the mobile app does the API calls and returns the information that the user is looking for. And so what we're doing with that is we're able to keep the personal information sort of one step removed from Amazon. And the other thing we do is it still requires the user to set up an Amazon Alexa account. And so we think there's some ability there that users have some control if they want to opt into this or not. It's not as good as we'd like. We'd like there to be a big red button saying here's all the things you need to be aware of before you opt into it. But at least it's the start in terms of giving users some ability to decide if they really want to participate. In the current version of the software they actually have to sign up for an Alexa account and so that's the step to get started with it going. So that's the current phase of the project and what it added to the mix is now you can say what items do I have checked out. You can say I want to check out this item. You can check information about what fines and fees you might have. There's just more things you can ask the app because you've told it who you are and it can do more things on your behalf. Hopefully in a somewhat more secure way instead of just going directly to Amazon Alexa. Okay and we're looking at phase three of our project which should be in the coming spring time to 2020 and still using the mobile app interface but providing an option, our developer is going to provide an option that doesn't rely on the Amazon Alexa voice engine. So they'll have another way to actually capture the voice and convert it to text and do the queries for us without necessarily having to use Amazon Alexa. And we'll see how that works out. I imagine it will have different versions of the software. So you can choose to use the Alexa version if you want or you can choose to use the non Alexa version. There'll be different flavors of our apps that users can opt into based on their knowledge and comfort level and what they want to do with the application. The other thing that will happen in the new version is that we'll actually be able to have a chat interface with our project as well. So you won't be limited just to doing voice queries. You can actually use it in a chat mode with a chat box and type your queries into the tool. And at first I thought that was, yes, that's very nice, but yeah, who's going to use it? And then our library hired a deaf employee who can't really use the voice recognition stuff. And she's really excited about our ability now to add chat into our smart assistant and have that kind of an interface with our assistant in addition to voice. Plus you have all the other accessibility things that come along for the ride in terms of language translations and just lots of cool things from an accessibility point of view that we really like about our smart assistant work. And again, you might look at this and say, well, again, Greg, this is all just going to come down the road. Why are you doing this? Why don't you just wait a few years and just let it naturally happen? But there's one thing that we noticed that the research company Infotech actually did some work and they claim that your users perceive you better if you are seen as being innovative. If you are a library IT group and you're perceived as being innovative, the users that you support will see you in a better light that they'll give you more support and they'll be more supportive of the work you're doing. And we see our work with things like smart assistants as being in the innovative realm. So we think we get some credits and brownie points for doing that kind of work. You know, even though this might not be a product that lives for a long, long time, it's a good starting point and I think it puts us in a good position in terms of being perceived as an innovative and academic library world. And the last slide I had was, again, along those lines, you know, you can look at this and say, well, what's the risk reward? What are the risks with developing your own smart assistant? And if you're successful, you know, there's not a lot of risk, you know, it's good news if you take the risk and you're successful, then you've got some good things going on. But even if you take the risk and you're not successful, you can still get some benefits from giving it the good try and learning from the mistakes that you maybe made and taking that and building on that experience. And if you don't act, then you really know better off than you were before. You know, if you don't take the risk, okay, you didn't take the risk, so you don't have to worry about the risk, but you also maybe didn't move yourself forward as much as you could have if you would have given it a shot. Okay, so with that, we're going to attempt to do the live demo here with our Parks Libro app and Lisa gets the chance of doing that. As always, listening, I have to activate the microphone. I'm going to press the button here. Open Parks Libro. Hello, Greg. Welcome to Parks Libro. You can now explore in the library. Here is your today's update. You have one item on hold. You have checked out a total of five items. You can ask questions like can you search a book? Can you cancel an item or list all my items on hold? Go through your user guide to learn more. How may I assist you? Ask to list all books on hold. You have one item on hold. Airwaller. This item is on hold shelf. Do you want to un-hold? No. What else can I do for you? Ask the list to... Lack... Stop it. I am not trained on this request. I know. Ask differently. What else I can do for you? Ask to list the books ready for pickup. I don't see any available items for pickup right now. Please try again later. What can I do for you? Ask to list all books checked out. You have checked out a total of five items. Option one, managing with data using Acryl metrics and PLA metrics. Peter Hernan, Robert E. Dugan, Joseph R. Matthews. The due date is May 8th, 2020. Option two, strategy maps, converting intangible assets into tangible outcomes. There's five of them. It's a long list. You have already authenticated. Please go ahead with your questions. Ask for the event for today. No events available right now. What can I do for you? I'm going to reopen Park's Libro because sometimes it shuts itself off and we're going to try to reactivate it here. Open Park's Libro. Hello, Greg. Welcome to Park's Libro. You can now explore in the library. Here is your today's update. You have one item on hold. Ask for events for today. No events available right now. What can I do for you? Ask for event next week. Here is the event I found. Library staff holiday luncheon on December 19th, 2019 starts at 12 p.m. and ends at 1 p.m. No registration required. Event is organized by Greg Davis. What can I do for you? Okay, so now I figured out why I didn't list the event because it's already in progress. So that first one that I asked for event, it was this event and it's already going on. So I'm assuming that's why I didn't say anything. Bad planning. Open Park's Libro. Hello, Greg. Welcome. Ask if the Park's library is open December 20th. Park's library is available on December 19th from 7.30 a.m. until 7 p.m. What can I do for you? Ask if the media center is open today. Media center is available today until 12 a.m. What can I do for you? Ask if the Park's library is open today. Park's library is closed on December 9th, 19. But will be open on December 19th, 2019 from 7.30 a.m. until 2 a.m. What can I do for you? Okay, so Greg and I figured out why that is. So in our LibCal, we are actually open 24 hours here the last two weeks while classes are in session. So until next week, the library does not close, therefore it's not open. Open Park's Libro. Hello, Greg. Welcome to Park's Libro. Ask to provide my current fee status. I am not trained on this request. Can you ask differently? What else I can do for you? I think that concludes. Thank you. Okay, so not too bad on the live demo, huh? Give it for Lisa. All right, so that's the presentation we had to show you our Park's Libro application. And I guess I would conclude this by just saying if you're... There are some other academic libraries out there that are also working with the company that we're working with to develop the Park's Libro tool. And they've actually been taking it farther so if any of you happen to be interested in the Libro tool and maybe would want to get in touch with our developer to see if there's any interest in contributing to the code base, I'd invite you to do that and if you need some contact information on that, just let Lisa or I know and we'll be glad to get you in touch with the developer and you can see what they can do for you. So with that, I think we're ready to see if you have any questions.