Out of Pocket.
For a long time we didn't want an Apple Watch or anything to do with it. It looked like the phone again, only smaller and strapped to you — a duplicate of the very thing we were trying to put down. Also, we really like analogue watches. Not necessarily fancy ones, but ones with visual quirks, character, possibly even powered by the sun.
Lately it's had something of a rebirth, in our house at least, and for a reason it was never really sold on: a Watch lets you decouple yourself from the phone. It still does the connected things you can't quite give up — paying for the coffee (a bank card taps just as well, granted), and a call or a message if there's ever a problem while you're out, along with all the small organising a day demands. What it doesn't do is put a screen with the whole world behind it in your hand every time you need one of those things.
This is Pete writing — WBD's founder — and when I say family, I mean two little girls, five and three. We're not fundamentalist about it, but we don't do screens of any sort for them. It's reading and paint and play, and lately, having loosened a touch, thirty minutes of Julia Donaldson on the TV once a week.
So for me, as a dad, it became important to decouple myself from the device too. With the greatest will in the world, if the phone is in your hand to pay for something, something will ping, and there you are, looking at it. They've never really seen dad with his phone, and I'd like to keep it that way. They're more aware of everything as they get older, and the separation from an overwhelming digital experience matters more, not less. Hence the watch.
Why an inbox on the wrist
Which is, long story short, why Vidual Inbox now has an Apple Watch app. From a distance, without any of that context, it could look like the last thing anybody needs: more messages, on a smaller screen, closer to the skin. And yes, a buzz on the wrist is still an interruption.
The subtlety is that you might be running a business, and people need replies — or at the very least, you need to know they've written. If you've connected your channels — Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, email, the live chat on your site — they all arrive on your wrist. You can answer from there, hand the conversation to a teammate with a note, or read it and realise it doesn't need you yet. Set a reminder and get back to it later.
Speak first
Speaking is the first port of call. Tap Speak, say what you'd say, and your words come back as text to read before anything goes anywhere. You don't have to — there's a keyboard — but we shepherd you towards your voice, because on a wrist it's by far the easier way. The dictation is Whisper, running on our own server; what you say goes there and nowhere else, and in our use it's a good deal better than the Watch's own.
The undo came across too, from the web and iPhone apps, a little quicker on the wrist: a reply to a customer waits five seconds before it sends, with the countdown in front of you and a big Undo button.
It was a fun thing to engineer — taking the interface we had and putting it through a much more minimal lens, a few words at a time in large type. And it seems to work rather nicely.
Connected, and more connected
So two things become true at once. You stay connected to the business. And you're more connected to everything else, because the phone is at home, or at the bottom of a bag, and nothing is asking you to look down. It's been freeing. Enjoyable, even.
If you use Vidual Inbox and wear an Apple Watch, it's already there. The Watch app installs with the iPhone app and signs in from it, and after that it doesn't need the phone near it — Wi-Fi or the Watch's own connection will do. Every channel, answered from your wrist, and the phone somewhere else entirely.
Which is kind of fun.
They've never really seen dad with his phone, and I'd like to keep it that way.