We’re rather fond of Evi here at True Knowledge.
We’ve been developing and shaping her growth for many months, seeing her progress from mere concept into the most advanced AI of her kind in the world. It’s been busy, demanding, rewarding and exciting all at the same time.
Over the last couple of weeks, new elements were introduced into the emotional spectrum – awe, frustration and joy in equal measure.
Awe because, although we knew how awesome Evi was and were excited about the rest of the world getting to meet her, we honestly had not expected the response to be so amazing. This all sprang up from one article on TechCrunch – the spark which was to ignite the powder keg and blow the story of Evi wide open. Other websites, journalists, bloggers, tweeters etc all jumped onto it and were eager to say hello to Evi and the world responded in kind.
The response was far more than we had expected for our little app and our servers were bombarded by questions. So great was the traffic that it exceeded our highest estimation and our poor servers struggled under the load.
Enter frustration, stage right.
People were annoyed that they were unable to use Evi. They could check out her classy looks, marvel at her voice recognition but for many, getting an answer was rather tricky due to the high demand. We were frustrated as we could see users giving poor reviews for an app that we knew to be excellent but were not able to prove to those reviewers.
Since that article went live we have been adding more servers to support demand for Evi. All of our resources are currently bent on making sure that Evi is as accessible as possible, and we have more yet to come to cope with the continued growing interest in Evi.
What has been amazing, and what has really led to the aforementioned joy, is seeing the comments coming in. Messages of goodwill, of encouragement, messages ordering the team to go home and sleep, and messages telling us to ignore the negative criticism. The goodwill was extremely gratifying, the encouragment was encouraging. The team… well… they got a bit of sleep, but the one piece of advice we did not take was to ignore the criticisms. Evi is designed to grow and learn. That is core goals of the product and of the team behind her. If we ignore the criticisms and only recognise the compliments then we learn very little. If you’ll permit me to quote the Buddha:
“A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals a secret of hidden treasure.”
Now, aside from the obvious opportunity for customisation within the quote above, it sums up our attitude and our feelings towards Evi’s users. Every community manager craves a community who are excited about the service, understanding of the challenges, encouraging about the future and supportive in all ways. In that regard, we are extremely blessed and Evi is a very lucky girl to have such an aweseome user-base who are eager to get to know her. So this is a tip of the hat to all of you who have said hello to Evi over the last couple of weeks, and especially to those who have been in touch with comments, feedback and suggestions. I’m only sorry that we’ve not been able to respond to every single message, but be assured that all are read and all are truly appreciated.
The future of Evi will be defined by her users, and based on what we have seen so far, Evi’s future is very bright indeed.
