Shabette Concier

» see docomo.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Siri shipped on the iPhone 4S in October 2011. NTT docomo did not sell the iPhone at all until September 2013, which left Japan's largest carrier with a two-year window in which its customers kept reading about a talking phone they could not buy. On 27 February 2012 docomo announced what it was doing about that, and on 1 March at one in the afternoon it shipped: a free app for eighteen of its Android handsets, called しゃべってコンシェル, roughly the talking concierge.

At the briefing, docomo's Minoru Etoh was asked the question the room wanted answered and did not dodge it. On the recognition technology itself, he said, there was not much difference between any of these services. The difference was that this one worked in Japanese, aimed at Japanese users and Japanese content. It existed so that you could reach things inside docomo's own portal by talking to them. ITmedia ran the piece the next day under the headline asking what it did differently from Siri. Etoh also said docomo had no plans to make it speak English.

The claim held up better than the modesty suggested. It had a vocabulary of several hundred thousand words at launch and recognition in the region of ninety percent. From June 2012 it also carried a knowledge question-and-answer function built on research out of NTT's Cyber Space Laboratories, the lab later renamed Media Intelligence, and the demo docomo liked to give was asking it the height of Mount Fuji. The speech recognition itself was licensed, from ATR-Trek, a Japanese company spun out of the national telecoms research institute, so the whole stack was domestic without being built in one building.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sixteen million in twenty months ~

docomo published the growth in its own technical journal rather than in press releases, which is probably why the numbers are not better known. Ten million users by August 2013, with over 400 million accesses. By the end of October that year, 16.5 million users and 540 million uses. By the autumn of 2015 it had been used more than 1.1 billion times, and by July 2017 the logs held over 1.7 billion recorded utterances.

Twenty months from launch to 16.5 million is not a slow product. It also stopped being a docomo-only one: from 7 November 2013 there was an iPhone build that ran on iPhone 5s and 5c handsets sold by the other carriers, with no docomo ID required. A carrier had written a voice assistant and then handed it to its competitors' customers for free.

The recognition and dialogue work won two awards that are worth naming because they went to joint teams. The Kiyasu Award, given by Japan's Information Processing Society, went in June 2013 to four docomo engineers and one NTT researcher, and the Maejima Hisoka Prize followed in March 2014. In 2015 docomo repackaged the whole engine as a licensable natural dialogue platform and sold it to other people. The first buyer was Takara Tomy, which put it inside a talking toy.

~ the sheep in the butler suit ~

The face of it was ひつじのしつじくん, which translates about as well as it can to Hitsuji the butler, and which is a pun: hitsuji is sheep, shitsuji is butler. He is a white sheep in formal dress. He did not start here. He arrived in November 2008 as the mascot of iConcier, docomo's earlier information service, with a maid character called Mei joining him the following September, and both are registered trademarks of the company.

From November 2012 you could replace him. Two docomo characters were free and thirty-five more came from content partners, each with its own cloud-synthesized voice and its own small talk. Nobody at docomo has ever published who drew the sheep, and I could not find it either, which is its own small comment on how these things get made.

~ the two verbs ~

docomo launched a successor, my daiz, on 30 May 2018, and then ran both for five years and a month. The 2022 press release announcing the end gets its own successor's launch date wrong, saying December 2018, and the Japanese Wikipedia has copied that error from it.

The announcement came on 19 July 2022, nearly a year ahead, and it is carefully worded in a way that matters. The headline uses two different verbs: the smartphone version of iConcier would be migrated into my daiz, and the iMode version of iConcier along with Shabette Concier would be ended. One is a handover. The other is a death. docomo also gave a reason, which not many of these notices bother to do: in light of recent business conditions, in order to concentrate management resources.

Updating the app converted it into my daiz and your characters came along, but four things did not. Dialing a spoken phone number, the docomo mail integration, posting to social networks and the infrared link were all simply gone. The characters that survived lost almost everything except chit-chat, because the useful functions now belonged to my daiz's own mascot. Android users who had the sheep set as their standby character found he had been silently switched to my daiz after the update. Anyone who reset the app had to download their characters again, and the notice admits that some of them could not be downloaded again at all, including ones people had paid for.

The service pages now redirect to the closure notice, which carries a typo in docomo's thank-you line that nobody has fixed. The sheep went on without it. He is still inside my daiz today, and on 28 May this year docomo posted that the whole character layer, him included, will be switched off on 30 November 2026. Eighteen years after he first turned up to explain an information service, the butler has finally been given a date.

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