With Ask My Buddy app, a friend is within the sound of user’s voice
Ask My Buddy is a free app for sending an alert to everyone you know, without reaching for your phone or computer. It works just by voice on a Windows 10 computer, a Google Home device or the Amazon Echo or Echo Dot. Plenty more like these are coming out soon.
With Windows 10’s builtin voice-recognition program, Cortana, you can say “Ask My Buddy to alert everyone.” and everyone on your contact list will get an immediate phone call, text message and email. Or you can confine it to a single person. Cortana isn’t great unless you’ve trained it by using it a lot, but the Google and Amazon devices are quite good at recognition. For Windows, we found we had to type the command in the Windows search box.
If you use Google Home, a shortcut is now available. Instead of saying “Ask My Buddy to alert everyone,” you can say “OK Google, call everyone,” or whatever words you choose. (We tried “Help,” but that confused Google Home, since it also responds to “help” as an ordinary word.) With Google Home, your voice command sends an emergency text, email and phone call to any group of people. To set it up, read the instructions at AskMyBuddy. net. It involves using Google Home’s “shortcut” setting.
Using the Echo Dot with Alexa, we said “Ask My Buddy to alert Louise.” Our friend Louise got a text message, an email and a phone call. A voice on her phone said “Joy Schwabach sent you an alert. Please check now.”
The free version lets you send 30 messages a month to five contacts. For $5 a month, you can send 400 messages a month to 10 contacts. (If you have to send 400 emergency messages a month you probably should be in intensive care.)
Microsoft is very touchy about who owns what. If you don’t have a legal copy of Windows, they don’t want to know you. So what do you do when you have to replace your computer’s hard drive and put in a new one? Do you have to go out and buy another copy of Windows? No way.
A reader told us his computer’s hard drive died, so he replaced it. He pointed out that it was a very easy thing to do, and we quite agree. A couple of Phillips screwdrivers is all you need.
But what now? What he
Inside the SolePower boots are a variety of sensors, including those for temperature detection, GPS, Wi-Fi, electronics and inertial measurement units, which track location and motion. Each is powered by a kinetic charger that harnesses the untapped energy produced by walking.
“These are things we normally take for granted in a smartphone,” said Hahna Alexander, co-founder and CEO of SolePower, which was founded in 2012 and has five employees.
A growing number of industrial devices are equipped with safety indicators — such as equipment producer Cat’s Link technology, which allows a company to track its fleet of backhoes, excavators or compactors — but the SolePower gear is a wearable, joining the ranks of smart helmets, vests, glasses and even bionic suits.
There’s a potentially sizable market to capture. Construction, for example, is one of the least digitized sectors in the world, according to research from The McKinsey Global Institute.
In a report released earlier this year, the institute estimated the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure by 2030 to keep up with global gross domestic product growth. In the construction sector, even a fraction of a percentage change in productivity could equate to substantial savings.
It’s challenging to track workflow on job sites, so inefficiencies can go unnoticed, Kerr said. “We need to know who is on the site and where they are at any given time … you can’t actually improve efficiency if you don’t measure.”
Chad Hollingsworth, president and co-founder of Norwalk, Conn.-based safety and communications company Triax Technologies, agreed that manual tracking on a clipboard is ineffective. “Most of these job sites can’t tell you how many workers they have or where they are,” he said.
Fatal injuries in construction, which is among the most dangerous professions in the world, rose by 2 percent to 924 cases in 2015 — the highest level since 2008, according to the 2015 National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“They all have stories from the job sites, and some are horrific,” Hollingsworth said. “One fell down an elevator shaft and no one found him until they smelled him … they’re working in the most dangerous industry and they do want tools to keep safe.”
Triax is selling a network safety device called spot-r, which is about the size of a pack of chewing gum and easily fastens to a belt.
Inside spot-r, a small sensor tracks workers’ movement, indicating when slips and falls occur. There is a button workers can press to point out a safety concern — whether that’s a hazardous spot in the field or an incident that occurred.
This form of tracking, though, can be controversial. Consumers and workers alike have pushed back against wearable sensors due to potential privacy infringement.
In a 2014 study, accounting and consulting firm PwC surveyed consumers on the future of wearable technology, with a focus on workplace applications. The study found a high volume of respondents felt wary about privacy and security — 82 percent were concerned that wearable tech would invade their privacy and 86 percent were concerned that it would make them more vulnerable to security breaches.
Donny Beaver, co-founder and CEO of HalenHardy, a Pennsylvania firm that invents safety tools for the industrial
outdoor workforce, expressed some doubt that construction workers would embrace technology like SolePower’s connected work boot.
“Anybody who really gravitates to that type of work has a bit of an independent spirit,” he said. “Culturally, it’s a huge difference from someone who is looking for an air-conditioned office.
“I don’t know what they’re finding so far with worker compliance, but unless you present it to them in a way that can really show them their job is going to be easier … I think there may be some pushback on the ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ thing.”
Beaver recalled working with oil and gas workers in western Pennsylvania four years ago. His team put GoPro cameras on workers’ helmets to watch what they were seeing and affixed air monitors to the workers to gauge air quality.
“Most of the guys saw it as extremely intrusive … the project never took off, although we
thought we were helping them stay away from silica dust,” Beaver said.
At Triax, that problem is already being engineered out of the system. After finding it was nearly impossible to get workers to wear devices with GPS tracking, the team developed a closed, secure network that is set up on site.
“You can think of it like the Wi-Fi at your house … when you come home, your phone automatically connects,” Hollingsworth said. “The workers’ sensor that they wear on their belt automatically connects to the network and then checks them out.”
Though SolePower uses GPS tracking, it has an advantage when it comes to battery life — the boots never die, while Triax wearers must replace the battery in their device annually.
And, for construction workers who must currently pay for their own work boots, an employer-subsidized pair that keeps them safe may look like an attractive option.