Sped Up Your Sourcing with Siri, Alexa, Google and Cortana

All right, had a little trouble with my video. Also, my green screen fell off over there, so that's the, uh, the wall that is normally in my background, in case you were wondering what, um, what was behind the green screen that I usually use so that you don't see that ginormous mess back there. So anyway, The topic for today, hmm, well, I did a little bit of a poll and I, well, we, the feedback was either OSINT or digital assistants. And we did cover OSINT quite a bit actually last time. So we actually had like 2 or 3 episodes. And I just decided that we were just gonna do digital assistants first. But the poll is still there, so if you go to the sourcing group and you want to vote OSINT up, then right now it's currently in third place. The one in second place is creating your own automation with Microsoft Flow and Power Automate, which actually is going to be, or was going to be, the part two to this one. So go ahead and vote up, um, the, um, the, the OSINT one. We covered SOCMINT, social media intelligence, in, in depth, I believe, in two episodes. But maybe we can do a little bit more on just regular OSINT as opposed to just SOCMINT. So either way, go to the Sourcing Method group. It's just facebook.com/groups/sourcingmethod. Um, right now that is where we are hosting all of our documents, etc. And for those of you that are just coming in, this is Shally, and it must be Well, it must be 1 o'clock on Friday afternoon because I'm live on camera. Some of you can see my, my Fox School of Business hat. I don't usually wear hats, but I found this one in my car, so I figured I'd show it off. Next Tuesday, I'm doing a leadership boot camp. This is part 2. You can still catch the video from the last one last Tuesday. It was the most popular presentation at SourceCon, so if you weren't able to attend SourceCon, Definitely come watch the recording and then on Tuesday you can see the live event. My daughter's artwork, by the way, in the background, she just told me this morning that she wants to replace it because she said, I was a lot younger when I did that. I'm like, yeah, so was I. I was a lot younger when you did that. All right, so let's talk about your digital assistants today. That's kind of the topic du jour. You know, I really like my digital assistants. In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, this is your personal assistant, virtual assistant, the apps or devices that come on our phones. If you have a mobile phone, then it would be Siri, for example, and you might invoke Siri by saying, "Hey Siri," if you have that activated. You might also not have that activated. I just said, "Hey Siri," so there it goes. If you have it activated and you say, "Hey Siri," then she'll listen and answer. You can also turn that off. This is useful if you have a watch, an Apple Watch. If you have a watch, you might want to deactivate it on one or the other, otherwise you might actually double activate it. It's kind of clunky sometimes. The other version of this would be, "Hey Google," or the Google Assistant if you have a Google Home or any of those devices, or if you have a Google phone, Android phone. Or an Android phone. And then of course there's Amazon's Echo, which you invoke by saying Alexa. Now that I just said it, the lights went on on my little Alexa. Alexa, cancel. I just realized this is gonna be a tricky session because I'm gonna have to not use the word Alexa. But anyways, her name is A-L-E-X-A, and then we have S-I-R-I, and then we have Google. I don't think I have an Android device in here, so there we go. Well, why am I even talking about this? So actually, as it turns out, I find that I am on conference calls all the time. I'm sure that never happens to you. I'm sure you don't spend 7 hours a day staring into your webcam talking in Zoom meetings. But in case you ever do find yourself in that position, or if you're on the phone a lot, like, you know, most recruiters usually are, you might find that it's not always a great idea to, you know, clackety-clacky start typing on your keyboard I also find that while I'm doing research, I can still use my virtual assistants in many ways faster than I can do things on my computer. So we're talking about asking your assistant questions and asking them to do things. You can ask them to do things like answer calls. Both of mine are connected to answer calls. With headphones, you can answer the calls on either Alexa or Siri. With the devices, you can actually tell them to answer the call. You can make a call. You can spell words. You can check stock prices. You can read or have the news read to you. And do all kinds of math calculations. And as I'm sourcing, one of the most useful things for me is around locations. So I might see a resume or a profile with a zip code I don't recognize. I can just ask, hey Alexa, what zip code is 30092? And she will come back and tell me.

Zip code 30092 is located in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. In 2015, it had a population of 34,000.

She's even going on to tell me the population size and everything. I can also ask, what is the zip code for Roswell, Georgia, and get the zip code for the city. I can ask what area code is 478, or I can ask what's the area code for, or what are the area codes for a particular city. Those are all really useful, and then there's also things like time and date. You can ask what time is it in LA. You can ask, what time is it in Bangalore? You can ask, what date is it in Bangalore? You can even ask for time conversions. You can ask, for example, what time is it in Bangalore if it's noon here? And you can also do other things with calendars. If you have your calendar connected on Alexa, it works with whichever calendar you have. If you have the Siri app, or the Google app, they work directly with the calendar that's in there. Cortana is Microsoft's and it works with Outlook. So as long as you have Outlook or the mail application, Outlook Mail or whatever it is on your phone, you can use Cortana. I'll actually tell you a few tips about that in a minute. You can ask for what's your next appointment? When's my next appointment? You can move your next appointment. You can say, "Hey Echo, move my next appointment to 3:00 PM." and she'll edit your calendar. You can ask for things like, add a meeting to my calendar, book an appointment, move my meeting. You can ask Echo to remember things. So you can say, hey Echo, remember that I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow at 9:00, and then she will remind you before your appointment. You can also tell her to remember other things. There's various ways that you can activate the timer or the time features with Alexa. For example, some of you might know that I'm a fan of the Pomodoro timer or the Pomodoro sets, which I use for sourcing sets. That's where you make a set of 25 minutes and you focus on one particular activity. So you can actually tell Echo or Siri or whoever your assistant is, you can say, hey Echo, create a timer for 25 minutes. And you can even stack them. So you can say, create a timer for 1 hour and 15 minutes, and then create a break timer for 1.5 hours, and create a work timer for 2.5 hours, and then create a break timer for 2 hours and 45 minutes. And you basically have a whole Pomodoro set right there set up. She'll let you know when it's been 25 minutes, then she'll let you know when it's been the 10-minute break, and so on. You can even set recurring timers like remind me every day at 12 to, I don't know, check in on my customer or something. You could say, hey Echo, remind me every Friday at 12:50 to log into Shelly's Alley. Hey, gotta do that one, right? Check holidays. When is the next holiday? What is the date for the next holiday? You can check things like how many days until. So you can say, how many days until April 7th, for example. You can even set reminders for different types of activities and you can name them. For example, you can say, set a reminder for work or set a work reminder versus set an appointment reminder versus, you know, you can name them and then you can actually ask for when is the next reminder and then she'll tell you. And by she, I mean whether it's Alexa, Siri, or Cortana. I don't know why they're all female voices. I think you might actually be able to change that, but I'm not really sure. What else can you do? Conversions, yes. Say you work with other countries and you need to convert currency to their currency. You can say, "Hey Echo, what's $120,000 in euros?" And she'll tell you the current conversion rate. You can create other types of conversions For example, measures and units. How many ounces in a cup? How many kilometers in a mile? Distance. How long is it gonna take for me to drive to my next appointment or how long does it take to drive to a particular place? And then she'll give you estimated drive times. As a bonus, these assistants will also calculate the delays in traffic. So they'll tell you right now it'll take 45 minutes or whatever. Which is pretty cool. Insert Alexa instructions during a talk. Hmm. I like that one. So let's see, zip codes, area codes, addresses, directions, locations. What's the capital of a state? What state is the city in? So, you know, hey Echo, what state is Montgomery in? Let's see. To-do lists. So these are not reminders, these are now to-do lists. You can create different to-do lists. You can say, create a work to-do list or create a home to-do list, and you can add things. So let's say you're sourcing on your 25-minute set and you come across an interesting article that you wanna read, but you don't wanna interrupt your 25-minute set. Just say, hey Echo, create a to-do list or add read the, you know, read Shelly's blog to my to-do list. And that will be added. If it's paired with your phone, that will also be added as either a task reminder on your iPhone or as a to-do list item in the Alexa app on your phone. Let's see, we talked about math. Oh, math, right, mathematical functions, division, multiplication. You can, you know, if you're trying to calculate an hourly rate, you can take the salary and divide it by 2080, all of these different things. Definitions. You look at a word that you don't know when you're reading a resume and you're not sure what it is, you can say, "Hey Echo, what is this word?" Or, "Define this word." You can ask for spellings if you don't know how to spell it or you're not really sure. You can make calls. My Alexa is connected to my AT&T account and as a result, I can tell Alexa to place a call, not just answer a call, but actually place a call. And then I give her the number. And I can also ask her to send a message. I can say, "Send a text message." Now Siri does that as well, and that's probably something you've done many times. It's a great feature for when you're driving. But when I'm at home in the office, I actually can use Alexa for those kinds of things, sending messages and so on. You can even do caller ID lookup. You can activate an app on Alexa, it's called Phone Number Check. So all you have to do is say, Hey Alexa, open Phone Number Check. And then she'll open it and then ask you for a phone number. Let's see if she does it.

Welcome to Phone Number Check.

There you go.

I can tell you some available information about a phone number. Just tell me a 10-digit phone number. Start with area code.

678-575-6960.

The mobile phone number through AT&T Mobility LLC is from Atlanta.

So now I know it's a mobile number and where it's located, which I could have known from the 678, but anyway. Translations, you can give Echo a word in another language and ask her to translate that word into English, or you can say, how do I say this word in another language? So you can say, how do I say welcome in French? How do I say welcome in Spanish? Japanese, etc. Let's see what else. Wikipedia. I know not everybody's a fan of Wikipedia, but sometimes it's a good way to look something up just to get a basic definition. So you can just simply say, hey Alexa, Wikipedia recruiting. I wonder what she says.

Here's the Wikipedia article on recruitment. Recruitment refers to the overall process of identifying, attracting, screening.

Not bad. Alexa, cancel. So you can get definitions from Wikipedia as well as, you know, more scientific information. Wolfram Alpha is also connected. So if you know about Wolfram Alpha, you can ask Alexa questions like you would Wolfram. For example, um, you know, that scientific facts and information, and she'll use Wolfram to look it up. Uh, conversions of currencies, date conversions, time conversions, You can make reservations and you can order lunch. Let's say you're in the middle of a sourcing set and you're hungry and you don't want to interrupt, you can just tell Alexa or Siri to place your regular order at your favorite Jimmy John's or your favorite pizzeria and the order will be placed through the app. You usually have to install an app for that on Alexa, but once you install it and you configure it and it knows what your location is, it just goes in and places the order. You can order an Uber. Let's say that you wanna get picked up so you can go to the airport, you can tell Alexa to order you an Uber. You can check your bank account, for example. See, shopping lists, to-do lists. Oh yeah, another order, you can reorder supplies. You're out of batteries. Hey Echo, I'm out of batteries, reorder my usual battery order. Or I'm out of printer paper or whatever. Who uses printer paper anymore anyway? I don't even have a printer. Let's see, timers, alarms, how much time is remaining on the timer. So you can say, set a 25-minute timer and then ask how much longer is left on my timer. Mindfulness, mindfulness and focus. There's a bunch of apps for that you can invoke. For example, there's white noise or gray noise or you know, black noise, different types of like depending on the— if you want static or do you want like actual ambient sounds. You can do 7-minute meditation. These are all skills that you can install. Used to be you had to install using the app on your phone. Now you can just tell Echo directly to install it. So if it's a skill that is available and you don't have it, you'll get a confirmation, do you want to open this app? And then that means yes, and now it's been installed. Uh, let's see, did I miss anything? Drive times, translations, calls, texts. Hmm, I think I covered most of the big ones. I'd be curious to find out what you guys do. Does anybody here use an intelligent assistant during the day to do things like get directions and maps and lookups and things like that? By the way, you can also Google You can tell Echo to Google something and she'll invoke a Google search. Now, the disadvantage of that is that she's only going to read you back the first result. Everything else, like the rest of it, will be sent to your app. So she'll say at the end of reading that first result, she'll say, "Check your mobile app for additional results," or something like that. So you only kind of get the first one. Let's see, does anybody have for where to recruit talent in specific locations? "Can you ask Echo for where to recruit talent in specific locations?" So how do I find Java engineers in Katowice, Poland? I wish, but actually, you know what though? Yes, you can. Here's how. You can program Alexa. There's actually a backdoor that, not technically a backdoor, but there's like another app behind it that is called Skills. I think it's skills.alexa.com that allow you to program your Alexa. I think it's Skills. Nope, that's not the one. It is Not the developer one. It's the one that is, hang on. I did this once for the kids and I freaked them out 'cause I created a skill that, you know, when they ask a particular question would give them an answer. So they were always arguing about whose turn it was to feed the dogs. And so I made a skill that basically, would pick a number randomly between 1 and 2, and if it was 1, it would say that kid's name. So when they would argue, I'd be like, well, just ask Echo. And they're like, Echo, whose turn is it to feed the dogs? And then she would generate a random number and say, it's Samantha's turn. And they freaked out. They're like, how do they know my name? It was funny. But yeah, you can actually create a custom, formula essentially that allows you to answer questions like that, but you would have to be the one providing the answers. It's not going to find the answers for you unless there's a way to, you know, point Alexa to a particular website where she can get the answer. So I guess you have to make the website. Let's see, what was the other one? Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, Cortana. So Cortana used to be its own standalone app, but I think they killed it. If they haven't killed it, it's on its way out. But what they did is they turned it into a Microsoft Office and Teams app that now works inside of Office and Teams. While it's not the same as a digital assistant because it doesn't work on a device externally, it works only inside of Outlook, it now happens to work in any device. So as long as you have Outlook installed, it works in there. As long as you have Teams installed, it works in there. And it does a lot of, interesting, useful things. For example, there's Play My Emails. If you have Outlook on your phone, you can open up Outlook, and once you're connected to Bluetooth, at the top there's a button that says Play My Emails, or you can just say, hey Cortana, play my emails. And what will happen is Cortana will go through your inbox, and you have a bunch of different commands you can do. You can reply, you can go to the next email, you can say next, next, next, you can go previous, you can skip, Pause as she's reading it back to you. Resume, of course. You can archive it. So, you know, if you're stuck in traffic and you have a few minutes, you can go through a couple of emails and archive them. Flag and unflag emails. Mark and unmark as read. You can delete. And, um, yeah, of course you can reply. And when you reply, it goes into speech-to-text mode, which is actually really good. It's surprisingly good. It's better than than Alexa, actually. I've tried to do speech-to-text with Alexa and it's not as good as Cortana. I think Google is probably the best speech-to-text right now. Siri's not as good as Google. If you're trying to look for an app that does that where you can dictate. Here's the cool thing. Now Cortana is on Alexa. So you can connect Cortana and Alexa together. It's a skill. You have to have a Windows account, a Windows device, but if you have a Windows laptop, for example, there's a Cortana in there that is connected to the taskbar, and it's also in Teams, and it's also in Outlook. And through that app in your Windows device, you can now interact with Alexa. So you don't even need to have an Alexa Echo device or, you know, one of those smart speakers. You can just use your laptop through Cortana to connect to Alexa. They did this because they did away with basically their digital assistant in exchange for focusing on the one that's inside of Office. So I think that's pretty much all the ideas. I wanna kinda get some ideas from the audience. If you haven't had a chance to put your comments in, do so at the sourcing method. Just come on back and drop a note on You know, what kind of things do you use Alexa for? And I'm talking about while you're at work, right? There's a lot you can do with devices when you're on the road, in your car, but I'm not referring to that. I'm referring to the things that you can do, you know, while you're basically in the middle of your regular sourcing day. Next up, what I would like to talk about is the routines. So routines are different. I'm looking into a way to share my phone live. Like, I think I can actually share the screen on my phone on Restream. I, I saw there's a way to do it, I just don't know how exactly. I'm going to test that out, and if I can do that, then on our next episode I want to show you Shortcuts. If you have an iPhone, Shortcuts are, um, kind of installed there. I don't know if I can— can I put this up on the camera? Is it going to get fuzzy? Let's see. Hmm. Okay, let me try that. Sorry about that. I was trying to figure out if I could Change that. There it is. Okay, so see that app right there called Shortcuts? Right there. So you can make custom shortcuts like the ones that you see there. These are one-touch shortcuts— calculate tip, get directions, um, things like that— that you essentially program on your phone with really easy drag-and-drop interface. And if you go into the Shortcuts app itself— I promise you I'll have a better way to share this— you can see I've got several dozen apps that do things like, for example, check flight status. Look up an emoji, tell me what color something is because I'm colorblind, sometimes I have to use the lens for that, set your alarm on and off, you can order food from it, you can look up definitions, all kinds of really cool things. And I use a lot of these for business. I've got one tab that is strictly dedicated to just the business apps, which is that one there. And it does things like do not disturb, so I can click that and it blocks out my calendar. Keep Me on Task, which sets up Pomodoro reminder. Silence During Meetings, which turns off the ringer. Let's see, Check Remaining Time, Get Directions, Give Me an Agenda of the Meeting, it looks up the calendar and finds out what's going on according to the agenda of the calendar. Email the schedule to someone, so I push that button and it generates an email with my availability and I just have to put in the email address. Open Cortana in Teams, that's an app as well. Let's see. Oh yeah, and one of my favorites, I don't know if it's going to work here, but let's see. Now this was just for fun. [NOISE] It's a noisemaker. There's a bunch of different ones, different funny sounds like that. All of that can be programmed. Once I figure out how to share that, I'm going to put it on screen and actually walk you through how to create a real basic app to do some of the things. Like for example, the one that I showed you that was the— so here's my healthcare ID. It's a button. I click on it and it opens up my healthcare ID, which is a screenshot with all the information on it. Sometimes I don't have my wallet with me and it's something that you get asked. Then the next topic after that, I wanted to cover Microsoft Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop. I've been working on a lot of automations. One of my favorite use cases for Power Automate right now is all of the clicking stuff that you need to do on LinkedIn. For example, if you want to remove contacts, there's really no automated way that I can find. I've been asking around. There's no automated way that I can find to remove a bunch of contacts that, you know, disconnect from them. And sometimes, you know, there's just, there's contacts in there that haven't been active and accounts have been gone for a while. You have to do it one at a time, but you can create a series of shortcuts with Power Desktop to do that. That's just one example. There's many other examples. So we'll talk about routines, shortcuts, and Microsoft Desktop Automate, or Microsoft Power Automate. I believe somebody said in the group that the desktop Power Automate desktop is free. I wasn't sure about that, so I'm going to double-check. I think it might be. And in case you're wondering what routines are, routines are basically programs that you tell your assistant to run and execute various things. Like, say you're leaving your house, you can say, "I'm leaving," and then it'll set the alarm, turn off the air conditioning, turn off the lights, etc., and like do a bunch of different activities. So routines could be really useful for the multiple activities that we might need to do on our, on our day-to-day. Anyway, that's what's coming up on Shelly's Alley. Don't forget Tuesday, Leadership Bootcamp. The link is right there on the stream, or at least it was earlier. Now I don't know if it's still— yep, there it is right there at the bottom, srcn.co/leaders2021. Hope to see you there. All right everybody, have a great weekend and see you next Friday.