Mark
Hi Seamus – the man that knows a lot about IT and things to do with the internet and all sorts of other things is on the phone right now, that is Seamus Campbell from Boldacious in Mareeba. Goodday Seamus, how are you?
Seamus
Good Mark, how are you?
Mark
Going great guns, okay you sent me the email that you wanted to talk about automation for home and businesses How do you pronounce that IFTTT sounds like I’ve got to do it squinting and a jerk at the same time I try and say it.
Seamus
Yeah it is. It is a bit, bit difficult I always have to slow down and say very it clearly and concisely but, yeah, I’m looking at just two, there’s a lot of automation tools out now. And these are just two of the more popular so the IFTTT, which stands for. If This Then That, that’s more for home automating stuff in your home, whereas the second one I’m going to talk about is called Zapier. That’s more for automating businesses.
Mark
So, when you’re talking about automation for the home. Something like my wife’s new robot vacuum cleaner is it that she can actually turn off with an app on my phone. That’s the type of thing we’re looking at.
Seamus
Yeah, exactly. So, and I don’t actually have many of those sorts of appliances or things in my house so I don’t use it myself very much but basically, if you can operate it by phone, almost always you can then set it to say start vacuuming 10 minutes before you get home. That’s a bad example
Mark
Yeah you would trip over it.
Seamus
That’s right. Or maybe if it is vacuuming when you get home you tell it to stop when you open the door, something like that. So it’s just, just things to make life a bit easier, and all both of these programmes do is connect two programmes, or two bits of software together and. Traditionally, that was a really hard job you had to know all these things called API’s and then you have to look at the language of the first programme. And then the language of the second programme and it was, it took a fair bit of skill to do as well, but what both of these programmes have done is make it so it’s just really is drag and drop.
Mark
So with a lot of these I mean, does that mean like when you get home, I mean if it’s a hot day you can feel the air conditioner to start up 10 minutes before you get home and get the jug going about five minutes before you get home and turn the TV on things like that
Seamus
Yep, exactly that sort of stuff. So, there are hundreds, probably thousands of things you can use and you can go to the ifttt.com website, and they give you examples of all the things that you can do so you can, say you know, I don’t know that vacuum cleaner that they’ve probably got that I haven’t looked for that one but it would give you examples of what you can do with IFTTT and the vacuum cleaner. And you can do things like there’s a lot of lighting systems now, Smart Lighting so there’s one, there’s a Philips Hue light bulb which you can control by your phone. So you can get that to automatically say, turn on when the sun sets in, in your area. So there are things like that that you can automate it, really. It’s, it’s a really good idea if you’ve got any of those devices, just to go out and have a look at what’s possible with your device.
Mark
Because nowadays with the technology and everything else I mean it used to be a big deal when you had a phone line into your place. Now, it’s got it so basically you can have the whole house, automated to do things up and down with blinds and everything else – it’s scary in fact.
Seamus
Yeah, so you can do a lot of these things with, with the controls in the individual apps but you can just add a lot more to them with this IFTTT. And you can do other things not it’s not just for the house like you can set IFTTT up to backup all your photos either on your Android or your iPhone to Dropbox say, automatically I mean I know they do auto backup anyway but if you wanted your own backup you can do that automatically. And you can do there’s one that I like is, they call it the escape phone call. So you set this up in IFTTT again and if you’re in a phone call that you want to get out of you text #escape to IFTTT, and then they will automatically call you back, either on your own phone or another phone so you can sort of legitimately say oh dear, oh dear I’ve got to go I’ve gotten another phone call.
Seamus
I like that one
Mark
Soon we’re not going to need human input that’s for sure. Now the other one you’re talking about – Zapier – now this is for business I understand
Seamus
This is much more of a business, yeah and again it’s, it really is just drag and drop. It’s a free programme. There are paid versions when you get up there further. But I, I, one of the things I use what I really really like is when I get my Ergon bill or Telstra or the internet bill. They come to me in an email, but usually, I don’t have to pay them for about a month. And I don’t want to pay them before they due because they get enough money out of me anyway. But I don’t want to forget them either so I’ve got a zap which is each little thing that Zapier does is called a zap. I’ve got zap – if it sees any of those bills come in, it automatically forwards them to a programme that I use for remembering stuff called Evernote. And then I just tell Evernote or type in the date that I want to pay that bill in Evernote. And that will send a reminder on that date to my, well it’ll send an entry into my Google Calendar, which will then give me a reminder on the date that I have to pay those bills
Mark
It sounds like having a mother in law over your shoulder.
Seamus
Yeah, yeah without the bad side of it (that was a bit rude but anyway, sorry). I’ve got, there’s another situation which I’ve set up for a client they’re a coaching client, a business coach. So, clients will have an expression of interest from the website that goes into a thing like a spreadsheet or a customer relationship management system. They need always need to talk to the client first to decide what package they should be doing. So, when they talk to them they put the click down on the package required for that client in the, in the CRM the customer relationship management system. And then they give them the price, and they just click today’s date, and that will automatically write an invoice in Xero or whatever, accounting software you’re using. So that will be sitting there ready with everything filled in correctly. For you to just send out – we could automate sending it out but that’s a bit dangerous as you want to check. Just before you send an invoice out.
Mark
But something like that nowadays, you go online to book your car into a service, you pick a date pick a time everything like that. It doesn’t tell you that day’s booked up. So maybe we could do maybe you could onsell that to dealership and car yards and mechanics and everything like that. You know, when you walk up there and they say oh we can’t take your car today.
Seamus
Yeah, they should be able to do that you can do one thing where you can, you have a programme which connects to your Google Calendar. It displays the dates that you’re available that you’ve told that you’re available on your website. So your customer can pick a time that you are available, and that synced back and forth automatically all the time. So, that would cover that sort of thing so it’s just, it is possible and quite relatively easy to do that. And I mean the car place could say well you know we haven’t got any cars left and they could say that it. When I say it’s easy, it’s actually, you’ve got to set up the whole system.
Mark
The scariest part is that in a couple of years we probably won’t have any human interaction there at all. I do have to take off very shortly mate, now these two IFTTT, and Zapier. If people want to find out more about this about controlling the machinery in the home, smart TVs now and all sorts of other things – they just do a Google search put those in and it will come up with the details.
Seamus
Yeah, just go zapier.com or ifttt.com. And they will tell you every app that they will work with Zapier, for instance, has got 2000 programmes that it will work with an IFTTT has got similar ones. And they also show you examples or you can just sort of scroll through and they’ll help you do things they’re really easy to get into and set up and they’re free, and they’re designed to be for you to not have any coding sort of skills whatsoever.
Mark
Okay, well, the other thing probably next week. Let’s talk about security cuz I do know that we’ve got on actually fortnight for things like you’ve got those monitors now those TVs that you can monitor a child you can see another part of the room or somewhere else. People actually breaking into those and hacking into the system so want to find out more about, can somebody hack in and control things in your house, an interesting one. Yeah.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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