The wearable Plantronics headsets worn by call-center agents, reporters and others who must type and talk at the same time have changed over the past 10 years. Slowly they've added sensors and enough processing power to be considered computers in their own right. But would anyone really want to hack them?
Plantronics thinks so. And next week this 50-year-old maker of telephone headsets is going to do the same thing that's helped everyone from Facebook to Apple to Bloomberg build their businesses. It's going to open up the APIs (application program interfaces) that developers need to write programs that talk to its products, and hope that the hackers will get jazzed enough to write brand-new programs that use headsets in ways that nobody had even dreamed of just a few years ago.
So what's an API? Think of an API as a bit like a definition in a foreign language dictionary; it's the standard that coders use to let one program talk to another. APIs have helped popularize Facebook and Twitter by giving developers a way to write lots of new programs that tie into these websites. But a lot of old-school companies -- General Motors, AT&T and Bloomberg, to name a few -- are getting into the game too. The name of the game is to stay viable by getting developers excited about writing programs that use the data you have to offer.
It's still early days for Plantronics, but according to Chief Technology Officer Joe Burton, his headsets are adding more sensors and computing capacity with every update. He sees a world where programs can whisper reminders of upcoming appointments into people's ears, and where software that uses Twitter or Facebook or Google+ can gain access to some of the sensor information that's already being processed by a Plantronics headset.
"I love the idea of being able to do a kind of unobtrusive broadcast page," he says. "Being able to whisper to everybody in building 19 that has their headset on right now: 'By the way there will be a fire alarm in about two minutes. Just disregard; we're testing.'"
Some of these headsets already know a lot more than most people realize. The Plantronics Voyager Pro can tell whether it's on a person's head or not; it can tell how close the user is to his desktop; whether he's speaking on a call, and what devices the phone is connected to.
Most of these sensors talk to a piece of desktop software called Plantronics Spokes. But because Plantronics kept its Spokes APIs secret, writing programs that could talk to Spokes has been pretty much a dark art for most developers. In the past, Plantronics had offered that intelligence to a handful of partners, such as Skype, Cisco, and Microsoft, Burton says. "It's matured enough -- and we've added a couple of new APIs -- that it's really time to democratize this. So instead of being Plantronics and five partners imagining what they can do, it's really time to kick some source code up there to the world at large and see what they can think of," he says.
Security companies like the idea of locking down user desktops, based on how close a headset is to its owner's PC, Burton says. "If you're moving away from your PC, can we lock your PC rather than waiting for it to time out," he says. "And when you move farther can we actually move it into power-save mode?" he says. "It turns out that those are all relatively trivial."
Virtual conferencing software could use the same principal he says. "If someone's farther from your PC, you might move them away from the virtual conference table."
On May 9th, Plantronics will open up a developer website it calls the Plantronics Developer Connection. There will be a software development kit and a headset emulator so that developers can test their code even if they don't have headsets in-hand. And Plantronics will also release code for a simple Twitter app it's written that takes the the data it's getting via the Plantronics API and broadcasts them as Twitter messages.
The messages are pretty boring, but they demonstrate how Twitter can talk to your headset. "All it's trying to show is that these applications can be broadcast not just to a piece of software on the PC,' he says, "but literally be broadcast anywhere across the cloud."
With a little more work, an industrious developer, could write an app that let you hit a button on your headset, smartphone, or PC and fire off a short voice-based Twitter or Facebook message, Burton says. "Either a smartphone or a PC developer that understands audio apps -- that knows how to write a recording app or knows how to write for a smartphone -- could have that prototyped in under a day."
