“What’s the weather in Chicago.”
The LED at the top of the pad glowed green for a second and then disappeared. Sitting in a corner of the conference room, surrounded by senior managers from Nest, Mike shot a quick glance at Sajid. Sajid, his heart thumping, his palms sweating, stared at the debug logs streaming out of the pad into a terminal on his laptop. The voice command had been received and decoded correctly by the voice recognition engine and had been routed to the server. He stared at the dots being output on the terminal, each representing a hundred milliseconds of elapsed time, each dot seemingly taking ages to appear. A second passed, two, then three. More dots. The server typically responded within three seconds. His fingers trembling on the keyboard as he checked if the pad had lost connection with the network, but no, the status from the pad indicated that wifi was up. He clicked on a browser tab to see if he had forgotten to start the server or if the server had died. It seemed fine. A fourth second passed. Joe looked anxiously at Mike. Mike shifting uncomfortably in his chair looked away. Mitch looked at Chris and smiled.