Tech Tips: Big technology for small tasks

Some of these tasks were created by the very technologies meant to save us. We spend time sending status reports by email and updating everything from spreadsheets to websites. Outside of tech, we’re burdened by a panoply of other, tiny jobs, ranging from turning off all the lights downstairs to logging your business mileage after driving. Taken individually, these tasks seem insignificant. Together, they carry a cognitive load that distracts us from the things we want to do. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a computer handle these time-wasters without having to think about them?

This wish is becoming increasingly viable. These days, more and more of the technology that we use is in our pocket or in the cloud. It also sits in our connected appliances, which are increasingly becoming part of what we now call the Internet of Things (IoT). Companies have produced online systems designed to connect these things and organize them in concert. This concept is an emerging wave in digital tech.

IoT enables you to automate tasks ranging from the practical to the cool. You can have your phone automatically text to your next client your revised arrival time when you’re going to be late for a meeting. Or message your significant other for last-minute requests when you hit the grocery store – then flash the lights at home when you’re five minutes away.

– AUTOMATED SERVICES

Several services allow you to tie features together. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. has its own business- focused system called Flow, which helps to connect Microsoft’s cloud-based services such as Office 365, SharePoint and OneDrive to others ranging from SalesForce to Dropbox.

Flow allows you to create your own integrations and makes others available free of charge. Financial advisors might use this technology to add new incoming email addresses automatically to a client-relationship management system, for example.

Another app with similar capabilities, If This Then That (IFTTT), offered by San Francisco-based IFTTT Inc., has a friendlier, more intuitive feel with a heavy IoT focus. IFTTT collates various tasks (which the app calls “applets”) into collections aimed at specific types of people or activities.

With these applets, you can do anything from automatically setting your “smart” thermostat when you leave home to tracking your working hours in Google Calendar and scheduling daily or weekly recurring tasks in an online productivity app called Trello. It can even tell you if your Parrot Flower Power plant moisture sensor detects that your plants are thirsty. (Sadly, it won’t water them for you. Yet.)

More seriously, integrating IFTTT with the Automatic Pro vehicle monitoring system can email you with a diagnosis if your car has engine trouble or tell you if your vehicle has left a specific area.

IFTTT’s basic version offers a simple, two-step process for creating an applet. You select a service and an event for the “if” step: “If I am mentioned on Twitter,” say, or “if my car sensor detects that my engine light is on.” Next, you select another service and an action for the “then/that” step: “Then turn my Internet-connected lamp to red.” Next, turn on the app and it will begin working. Anything beyond that level of capability requires a paid account.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Zapier Inc., a competitor of IFTTT, offers a similar two-step service free of charge or allows you to create more complex workflows (which the app calls “zaps”) along with access to more than 750 services for $20 per month.

(All amounts are quoted in U.S. dollars.)

Prague-based Integromat SRO charges fees based on the number of operations you complete. Its free service allows 1,000 operations per month, but they may take up to 15 minutes to complete – not ideal for sending that text message while at the grocery store. For $29 per month, you get one-minute execution time and 40,000 operations each month.

For a more highly functional and business-focused approach, London, U.K.-based Tray.io Inc. focuses on visual drag-and-drop programming, enabling you to build graphical flowcharts of the workflows you want to create. This app will execute 1,000 workflow steps per month free of charge, although beyond that the pricing is customized in keeping with a more enterprise-oriented tone.

– AUTOMATION IN YOUR POCKET

Connected, automated services become especially useful on your smartphone or tablet, which you carry around all the time and can tell online services where you are. There are several phone-specific options, such as IFTTT’s Do app, which enables you to create a single button on your phone’s home screen for specific tasks such as dictating a note into the Evernote online note-taking service. Apps such as Do and others are available on Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc.‘s Apple Watch, meaning you can automate such tasks from your wrist.

Apple’s iOS app, Workflow, which also has an Apple Watch version, allows you to string together a series of actions directly from your phone and into recipes that you can then access quickly from your phone’s home screen. Examples include calculating a split tip at lunch, storing a note to yourself, saving a website from your phone to a PDF or adding reminders to alert you only when you’re in a certain location.

Another smartphone-based iOS app, Quadro, allows you to automate what happens on your main computer. This app, which connects your phone or tablet wirelessly to your desktop machine, replaces the complex, arcane keyboard combinations that we’ve all grown used to. You can create collections of instructions for specific applications, called “pallets,” to develop one-touch functions such as copying, pasting and formatting – then string them together.

The free version of Quadro offers basic functions, but the premium option, costing US$15 per year, gives you more than 100 types of actions. Hitting a single button on your phone can resize an image, change the colour saturation and insert it into your editing application in one go, for example.

Automation services such as these can burn up a lot of time as people play with them just for the “cool” factor. Over time, as more devices and cloud services connect with each other, these types of apps will become increasingly useful, however.

Eventually, pressing a button on your Apple Watch will enable you to warm up your car remotely on a cold winter morning while starting up your coffee maker and reading New York Times headlines aloud. We’re almost there already, and new services are appearing every day.

In the meantime, voice-driven digital assistants are becoming more adept at integrating with these apps, creating yet another layer of convenience. With the right devices installed, you can say, “Siri, turn off the living room lights” to your Apple Watch, which then will happen “automagically.”

This technology really works, and it’s very satisfying.

© 2017 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.