Yeah, thank you so much. Hi, good afternoon. I see a couple of familiar faces who are there for the workshop yesterday. So let me introduce myself again. My name is Sohan. I work in Amazon as an Alexa evangelist. My job involves helping developers build skills for Alexa. And part of that involves talking about voice design. Now, a lot of people ask me what, you know, give me some tips about what, I mean, building skills or what are the key components of building a skill. And what I usually say is the tech part is easy. We just did that in a workshop yesterday. But the tricky part is actually designing for voice, because it's very different from what we've been used to, which is essentially designing for screens. We have used to, you know, designing for web or mobile. And I'm sure you guys have done that. So let's talk a little bit about voice user interfaces and how it differs when you're designing for the year as opposed to designing for the eye. I'll give you a small, you know, I'll set some context first and look at how we have interacted with tech so far. And we've started in the 70s with character mode, which was when the era of the person computing really started. And we went from character mode, which is essentially small black and white monitors with keyboards attached where you enter text commands. We went from there to the era of GUI, like graphical user interfaces, which still exists, of course, but it first started in the mid 80s where you essentially had operating systems that were visual in nature. So you could see a file on the desktop or you could move this piece of hardware around that would translate onto the screen. And remnants of that still exists today, of course, you know, with your macOS and your windows and your Linux and stuff like that, but that was for the first time in the mid 80s. In the mid 90s, things changed to the era of the web and to access websites for the first time, you could get information on your fingertips and to really access that information, you had to use this thing called a browser, right? And when we first started using browsers, we were introduced to so many new elements and new ways to actually get information. In the mid 2000s, I think something we're all familiar with the era of the mobile, right? Where essentially we went from really basic phones with small screens and keepers that were fairly clunky to the advanced smartphones that we have today. And think of the sort of interactions that you have on your phone today, right? Like a swipe right or pull to refresh or how you zoom a page by pinching in. Those are some of the interactions that didn't exist before, but thanks to the advancements in tech and thanks to how tech has really evolved, how we interact with tech has also evolved. So if you see every 10 years or so, there's a change in how we have really interacted in tech and as if on time, sometimes in the present, in the 2010s, mid 2010s, we finally move to the era of a voice user interface. Now you might think as humans, voice is something that comes naturally to all of us. We communicate via voice and language. Why did it take so long, right? If you've seen a lot of science fiction in the early 1900s, if you've read a lot of science fiction in the early 1900s, having like these robots that talk was like the sort of fever dream, right? That was that and flying cars. And I think we're working on both right now. So why now you think? The reason is it wasn't so simple, but only now we finally have the speech to tech's capabilities. We have the data, we have the data processing power, we have the network power. So all of this has finally sort of come along for us to be able to talk to machines and hear an intelligent response, right? So at Amazon, we sort of believe that voice represents the next major disruption, which means that we will be talking with machines. We will be interacting with machines via voice a lot more at home, at your workplace, at your university, in your car, and so on, right? So I promise this is the only marketing slide, but this is the Amazon Echo. Essentially, it's a device that lets you voice control your world. And yeah, it's a great device, if you want one, you'd probably use it already. On the Echo, there are a lot of things you can do built in, you know, you can ask the weather, control your smart home, lights do like household reminders, set alarms, all these typical sort of things, but you can really enhance the capabilities of an Echo device by using something called a skill. A skill on an Alexa-enabled device or an Echo device is like an app on your phone, right? How on your phone, you can do a few things, but you download apps to do a few more things, right? So that is just to set some context about what a skill is, what an Echo device is, what Alexa is, and so on. So let's get into the meat of things, right? So we all have been designing for different platforms for a while now. Of course, few of you might have started with desktop. Most of us probably started on the web or on mobile. So we've sort of got an idea of what designing really means. But like I said, so far, we have been designing for tech which included screens, right? And one thing we can take away is that when you focus on the user and when you focus on the platform, you sort of get like a good user experience. But it takes a lot of effort, right? When the web first came around, it wasn't always pretty like it is now. I don't know if it seems like a fairly young crowd, but the early days of the internet websites really sucked. It was terrible, right? Basically, people had no idea of what to do, so they just put in as much, you know, as many like logos and flashing GIFs and mark we text on it as they could, right? And honestly, I know there's a government thing happening next to it, but a lot of our government sites look like that in the early days, which was a little embarrassing. But of course now it's a lot better, right? Because we finally had, we finally had like templates and block templates and people finally understood the web. We went through the same thing when we moved from web to mobile, right? When I don't know if you guys remember surfing a website on your mobile when smartphones just became a thing, but you had to like zoom in like 300 times to read like one line of text because responsive design wasn't the thing back then. It took a lot of people to think about design and to really think about the sort of paradigms that would work, not just on mobile, but also on your laptop and desktop. And then people thought, hey, we should probably, you know, have a uniform sort of experience. And then they came out with responsive design. So now reading a website on your phone, assuming, you know, it is mobile responsive is a fairly easy task. It's the same with voice though. When voice was launched like few years ago, people just sort of, A, they either assumed like it could do everything. There are of course limitations in tech, when in natural language understanding and so on. But they also still sort of thought, hey, let's port the sort of experiences that we have had on mobile and web, right? Just take the same thing. I want to be the first in the space, you know, like first prime mover advantage and that sort of thing. And they sort of ported those real experiences without thinking about the fact that it's a different platform altogether, right? You're designing for the year and not for the eyes. So things change. So we're still at this phase, I think, where, similarly, how people used to zoom in on mobile, where we're still at that phase with voice design, right? And it's going to take a lot of design thinking from people such as us to really sort of nail the voice experience on voice user interfaces. But that's what we're here to do. So let's talk about some differences when you're actually designing for voice versus designing, you know, for the eye. I think the biggest sort of difference is this, where with your eye, you expect uniformity, but your ear really expects variety. How we really look at graphical user interfaces is we sort of teach ourselves what something does, yeah? So if you go to a website or you go to an app, you sort of want a uniform experience there.  Suddenly that search bar isn't there anymore, right? They've added like another button that leads to a search bar. We're all going to be very disoriented for a while because we're so used to it being that. We sort of teach ourselves that, okay, this button does this. Just as an experiment, if you want to, you know, sort of, if you don't believe me, take out your phones and look at the location of the app that you use the most, right? And change it around. Change the location of, I'm guessing it's either WhatsApp or, you know, Snapchat or Instagram or whatever. Change the location of that app. You will see that the next time you want to use the app, you'll go to where it previously was because you sort of trained ourselves for that app to be there. That's how we learn user interfaces when it comes to screens. With voice though, it's not quite the same. The year, for some reason, it's designed that way but doesn't like reputation as much, right? You want a lot of variety. So you really sort of need to keep that in mind while designing your voice user interface. With GUI, like I said, again, there is a defined happy part. If I go to an Amazon or Flipkart, I know that clicking on these four buttons will take me to a page that says buy and clicking on the buy button is done, right? So there is a defined happy part to do something. If I go to a travel website, I know that first I have to enter the details of where I want to go. Then, you know, I enter my personal details and then I pay and it's done. I can't do much outside of what the website really provides me. There are buttons, there are menus, there's a search bar but that's pretty much it. So there's a defined happy part to do something. Again, with voice, there is no such guidance. You can hint at the user to do something but at the end of the day, the user can say whatever they want, right? So it's really up to you to sort of figure out what to do. Also, again, all the words that you see on a graphical user interface are designed for writing, right? Or, you know, reading. And on voice, though, you're designing it for speaking. Yeah, a good example, I think, outside of tech is the Harry Potter movies. Has anyone read the books and seen the movies? I'm guessing most of them, right? So you'll actually notice that the dialogues in the books are a lot different from what you hear in the movies because how we read a dialogue versus what is said in a movie or in a cinematic visual experience is a lot different. Yeah, so there is like a sort of slight difference there as well. And finally, and this might not be in every case but largely, you know, when you interact with a screen-based device, especially a mobile phone, it's a very individual interaction, right?  So even at a social gathering, if someone, if there's a question about say, hey, does Virat Kohli have like the most ODI hundreds now? Let's find out.  Whereas voice is a far more communal sort of interaction. The way at least Alexa and all the other smarts because they're designed, it's meant to be like either in your home or at your workplace where other people are around and they can also hear what's happening. So it's a fairly communal sort of experience. So these are the fundamental like differences I'd say between a VUI and a GUI, right? So keeping that in mind, we have come up with four voice design patterns that you'll, that you probably need to think of if you're building for voice. So let's just get right to it. Before that though, this is the sort of core interaction of any voice, you know, any like voice user interface where first the user says something and that's called an utterance and utterance is what a user says. So if I say something like Alexa, what's the weather? What's the weather is the utterance. So the user says something like what's the weather and that's the utterance. All voice interactions are very, very situation specific, right, which why you see in the core interaction there's this huge thing that says situation because the response that you need to hear from Alexa is based on that situation. And I'll go into that a little later on. And that's the response you hear. And sometimes you have like a prompt from Alexa as well, you know, if a user hasn't said something and there's a reminder. So we'll get straight into it and talk about the four voice design patterns. All right, so the first one is called being adaptable, which is letting users speak in their own words. Now, again, as designers in the crowd, when you're designing for GUI, right, when you're designing for a screen, it's really you guys who decide what the user sees. So you guys say, hey, if we change the color of this button to orange and instead of, okay, we type the words by, there's like a 30% chance a user is going to click on it. So let's do that. That's typically what we do as a designer. And y'all are really deciding saying, hey, let's put all this information here and then the next button make this button this color and then this what the user sees. So you're really deciding what the user sees and the user has to sort of learn that interface to get something done. Yeah, that's what we do as a designer. With voice though, it's the opposite because the user sort of is going to say whatever they want. Yeah, and it's really up to you as the designer or the developer of the skill to be adaptable to what the user said. Yeah, and for that, there is a lot of tech, of course, but a lot of design as well goes into it. So for instance, let's, before that though, let's talk a little bit about something called an affordance. Does anyone here familiar with the concept of an affordance? An affordance is essentially something that lets you know how to use something by design. Yeah, for instance, a sign that says push the door in next door door handle is an affordance because it's letting you know how to use that door handle. Yeah, so there are roughly three types of affordances. One is explicit. Like I said, the push sign is an affordance. Something like a pattern is something that you see everywhere worldwide, maybe a convention, like the save icon on your system. The floppy disk is a pattern that you see everywhere. It's the universal symbol for a save icon or the Wi-Fi symbol. So even if you go to a foreign country where you don't know the language and you can't read anything, you see that Wi-Fi symbol, you know, okay, that's what Wi-Fi means, so it's an affordance. And there are also negative affordances, which is essentially when, okay, like in a form, right? And when you disable a button and then the user automatically knows that something they're filled in is either wrong or incomplete, it's a negative affordance because that way by design, you're telling the user that, hey, there's something wrong with what you're filled. Yeah, so it's something that lets you know what to do. So that's an affordance. On screen-based devices, we had to sort of evolve from going from, you know, modeling how things looked in real life to, you know, flat design. So in the early days of the internet and in the early days of mobile, we had like skewomorphism was a huge thing, right? Where we sort of took real life objects. So this was how a volume control looked on both web and, you know, mobile, essentially because this is how a volume knob looks in real life. So you'll see like a drop shadow, it'll look little 3D, it looks like I can actually feel it and I have to move it, but you're actually moving a mouse or using touch screen to move the volume up and down. Then when people actually got a little used to something like this, we went to like flat design. And I'm sure you guys remember the whole flat design shift in iOS, you know, the whole thing, where designers basically said, okay, I think users know what to do, we can move to flat design. So the users know that if I move my finger across this bar, the volume will increase or decrease. Yeah, so that is the affordance basically. In voice, again, there is no screen. So you'll have to say something out loud to increase or decrease the volume, right? So you can say something like turn up the volume. So the intention or the meaning or what we call an intent behind what the user said is the affordance in voice, right? So when you say something like turn up the volume, that becomes your intent. You want the volume to increase. So that's the affordance. The problem with voice is this, right? You can get your users to say something like turn up the volume. It's fairly standard way of saying this, but most users will say things differently. Again, remember, you know, it's a voice user interface. So people can say something like volume up, louder, make it louder, turn it down, set the volume to six and so on, yeah? So these are different utterances that you can have that need to match to your intent, which is the affordance. So having just turned up the volume work won't really work.  So you should write your design or your skills such that it can take any of these and actually do that action. This is another example. So these are different utterances to basically get the name of a college, right? It's a skill that gets your college. So I can say something like, you know, let's assume the name of the skill is college finder. So ask college finder for the best colleges, for the best colleges in Bangalore, for the colleges with the computer science program or for colleges with the computer science program in Bangalore, right? These are different ways of saying the same thing, which is to find a college, right? We're trying to be adaptable to what the user can say. All these will match to an intent that you as a designer or a developer will define, which is called like, let's call it refine search. You can call it whatever. So it's really up to you to define these different types of utterances to match to that intent, yeah? Also, you'll notice that there are some words in blue, right? And those are essentially what is called an entity or a slot, which are variables within an utterance, right? Anything in an utterance that can change. So in the second one here, this name of the city can change because I can easily, another user can say something like, ask college finder for the best colleges in Chennai or Delhi or, you know, Mumbai. Also in this example, the type of degree is, can change, right? Because I can easily say, for colleges with the electronics program for an economics program and so on, yeah? So things that can change within an utterance is called a slot, right? And essentially, this is what it is. You have like a degree or a location. Your utterances should match to an intent that's defined and also have slot value. So you have like a degree and a location. What the use of all of this is, is essentially this is how you'd be developing your skill, right? Where you give training data like different utterances matching to an intent and then there are natural language understanding algorithms, right? And I'm going a little technical, but what the NLU algorithms do is sort of take what the user said and it matches it, you know, with an intent. And that's how you know the intention or the meaning or the affordance behind what the user has actually said. There are sometimes though, why you might want to use synonyms as well, right? Sometimes your slot values can have synonyms because assuming you have a skill which has four different slot values, which is size, right? Like tiny, small, medium, large. Again, not all of your users will use the words tiny, small, medium, large. And the reason is someone might not know how tiny is tiny or they might just use a different word. Who knows, right? So instead of tiny, they might say like minuscule or little instead of medium, they might say average, middle, or in between. Instead of small, they might say little again. Yeah, so it's really up to you to sort of design your skill in such a way that it takes all of these synonyms as well. And you know, sort of you're adaptable to what the user is really saying. Yeah, so that's why you really need to be adaptable while building a skill. Okay, we'll talk about the second voice design pattern which is to be personal, right? And which is essentially talks about interactions in context. I think the great thing about conversational interfaces in general, you know, chatbots and Alexa skills and so on is, and I like to use this line a lot, right? So far we've been forcing humans to think like computers. Humans shouldn't be thinking in terms of a radio button, drop down menu, swipe right, et cetera. Those are not natural interactions. But now we're actually forcing computers to think like humans, right? So with conversational interfaces, you can actually have like personalization and contextualization in your skill.  One is you can really tailor and change your skill and evolve your skill over time. Yeah, the first time a user logs into a skill, you can say something like, hey, welcome to this skill. Here's how I can help you. This is what I do and so on, right? Maybe the second time you say the same thing. The third time you say the same thing, but you don't want to say that exact same message the 20th time the user is logging into your skill. They already know how to use your skill, right? But on the other hand on phones, you're going to see the exact same UI every time you go there, which is a good thing. You don't want your UI to change. You want it to be uniform and you want to have that consistent experience, right? So with a screen-based device, you like it to have that uniform, consistent experience, but with voice design, you know, you sort of need to tailor your experience and change things around quickly, right? So really have your skill evolve. You also need to think of the sort of roles that your skill plays with the user, right? So we roughly look at it as three different type of roles.  It's about giving information immediately. Like a good example is a weather skill where I say something like Alexa, what's the weather? And Alexa says the weather in Bangalore, so and so. You really want to be quick and precise and concise. When I say something like, what's the weather? I don't hear, hey, welcome, I'm your weather skill. I can help you with this, like my Facebook page to know more, et cetera, right? Because it's a very informational, it's a very transactional sort of skill. So giving a quick response back with like a concise amount of information is what you really want. Another type of skill is a concierge, right? Like the guy helping out the lady there. It's a type of concierge. So think of like a travel planning skill and I'll show you an example later where you'd call up your travel agent and then there's a lot of back and forth between the two, right? There's a lot of back and forth between the two and you're really sort of guiding the user and helping the user by asking questions and you're not getting something done for the user.  So based on that, the responses will be very different, right? You'd really personalize and contextualize your skill based on that particular role. And the last one is a sort of entertainment type of skill. It could be a game. It could be a choose your own adventure that's very popular on voice interfaces where you say something like when the skill says, hey, you've entered this dark room and there are two doors. Which one do you enter? The left or right, you know? A different adventure happens on each. Maybe it's just like a fun podcast type thing. So it's an entertainment skill. So you have to tailor your response a lot more. Maybe add more jingles, add more sound effects. You know, add... There are these things called speech cons which are local lingo words that Alexa can say. So you can get her to say things like ballet, ballet and macha and stuff. So really think of how you can keep your users engaged with using things like that. So that was two on how you can be contextual. The third one is be relatable, right? Where you're talking with your users and not at them. Again, on web and mobile, it wasn't really a cooperative experience, right? Again, the website would offer you something and it's fairly individual sort of experience. With voice, it's a very cooperative experience. There's a lot of back and forth between the skill. It's almost human-like. That's why it's called a conversational interface. So you really want to talk with your users and not at them, yeah?  They are cognitive load. Shouldn't be on trying to remember how to interact with your skill. It should just be able to speak with your skill naturally, right? So this is a bad idea, right? Where you say something like, Alexa, open holiday planner and tell me the cheapest return flight from Bangalore to Goa on the 10th of December, returning on the 16th of December, with offers available on HDFC with cashback, blah, blah, blah.  So you shouldn't expect your users to do this. And invariably, if you expect your users to do this, you're the one who'll end up with a whole bunch of errors, right? Because your code has to actually parse all of this, pick out the right things, and then, you know, and then provide the user an answer. You'd rather have something called a multi-turn dialogue, where like I said, it's like calling your travel agent and there's a lot of back and forth, right? So for instance, this is how the conversation would go. I know there's a lot of text, but so in the beginning, the user says something like Alexa, let's call the skill outdoor guru. So Alexa, start outdoor guru. And then the skill says, you know, welcome to outdoor guru. I can help you, blah, blah, blah. Where would you like to go? The user says, go ahead.  User says, yes. Alexa says, when do you want to leave? Next Friday, until when? The following Tuesday, what would you like to do? I'll be fishing. Did I get all of this right? Yes. And now, you know, I have two ideas for you and you hit like your API and get some information and present it to the user. So it's a lot like how you would actually call up like a travel agent or, you know, like a holiday planner and it's a very interactive, cooperative sort of experience. So you should try and build your skill like this, where essentially you're helping the user out with a few things, right? If you really think about it, things like source and sorry, destination, dates of going and coming back, what activity you'd like to do are all what I said is a slot value, right? It's a variable at the end of the day. And instead of having this, where you have like different slot values in one huge utterance, you're sort of eliciting the slots from the user. So the user is engaged, is conversational and you're getting the right answers. There are a few things happening here. One is you're eliciting slots at a couple of places. So you're helping the user out with those slots. In this step here, you're actually confirming with the user a slot value, especially when you have a lot of proper nouns, that's a good practice, because like for instance, Bangalore and Mangalore sound very alike. So maybe you just wanna make sure Alexa picked up the right thing, right? So you're confirming the slot and after so much information, you might want to confirm with your user saying, hey, this is the information you gave me, is this right or can I make any changes? And if the user makes any changes, please go ahead and actually write your voice design and your code to be able to accommodate those changes as well, yeah? So this was about how you could actually be relatable and not have things like this, but actually have like multi-term dialogue to get information done from the user. And the last voice design pattern is to be available, and by that we mean basically rethink your menus and your top level UI. What this essentially means is again, so far with voice and with mobile, sorry, with mobile and with web, we've been sort of designing our data in a slightly different way than what you should for voice. It works in the sort of same principle that there's a front end and a back end. In the front end with voice user interfaces, things you see, whereas in front end on web and mobile, it's your screen, that stuff remains the same, but how your data is stored is going to be slightly different, right? So I'll tell you an example, right here. If, and this happens a lot of times, so if a user, rather if Alexa says where do you want to go, a user can say something like go out tomorrow, right? Yeah, just give me two, I'm also, yeah, go out tomorrow. Yeah, that happens often and then it would be a really bad experience to ask the question when you want to leave again because the user has already answered it. So in effect, the user has over answered, yeah? That happens often. So yeah, it might leave a bad experience, but you'll still get your API call at the end of the day. So that's fine. But when the opposite happens, it's even worse. So Alexa asks, where do you want to go? And the user says, I want to leave from Bangalore, right? So the user actually hasn't answered the question. So you don't have this piece of information and then you continue this way and you don't have one piece of information, one slot value and your API goes for a toss basically, right? Because your information is incomplete. So typically users will over answer and under answer and essentially how you'd handle that is not by using a typical flow chart type UI, right? This is how you would look at screen-based devices where you say, okay, a user logs in, a user does this, a user clicks on this button and there's this entire flow or the user clicks on the other button, there's another flow. So you have a lot of nested level, you know, iterations. You'd rather look at what we call a frame-based UI where there is a frame in which you need certain piece of information and until that frame is over, you keep asking questions in that same frame. Yeah, so in this case, until you get these four pieces of information, these four slots, until you elicit these four slots, that frame keeps continuing on and on, right? So that frame keeps going on until all those pieces of information are complete and then you make the API call. So it's a slightly different way of actually looking at how the data is stored. Also, try and have a wide top-level UI as opposed to, you know, like nested menus. And the reason is this, I'm going to take a very specific example. If you want to find the IFSC code of your bank, what do you do?  And the reason, and it's completely fine to do that, and the reason is on screen-based devices, you have a limited number of pixels. So you as designers say, hey, this is the most important stuff we need. This is a hierarchy of important things. So let's stick all of that accordingly, right? If you translate that to mobile web, you have fewer pixels. So you might show just the five most important things and the user has to probably make more clicks to get to a IFSC code. It doesn't work that way with voice though, right? A user is not going to say, okay, open my profile, okay, go to bank account, okay, do this, et cetera. They'll directly say, hey, Alexa, what's my IFSC code? Or open HDFC and tell me what my IFSC code is. And that wouldn't work if you had like a huge nested sort of menu, right? Which is why you need to have like a wide top level UI where these pieces of information are accessible immediately, all right? So that's a slight difference again, and it's all about being available. So just to recap, we spoke about being adaptable, which is let users speak in their own voice, which means utterances, intents, and slots. Be personal, which is interactions within context. You want to be relatable as well, which is talk with your users and not at them. We don't want like IVR type responses. And we also want to be available, which means to rethink the way your data is stored and how your menus are stored. Just want to end with this quote from Gartner. Gartner does a lot of research on cutting edge data and innovation. So in 2018, they said something like this. They said conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with the digital world. I think it's a great quote because, you know, conversation interfaces are really here to stay, and I'm sure it's going to disrupt how we engage with tech, basically, right? And if I were to tell you 10 years ago that keyboard and mouse won't be the primary user interface, you already have laughed at me. So I'm here now telling you that touchscreen probably won't be the primary user interface 10 years from now. And it'll be conversation interfaces. So as designers, y'all are the ones really at the forefront in defining that experience. So yeah, good, do check it out. Anyway, thank you so much. These are my details. Thanks a lot. I think I'm out of time. So I'll have questions off stage. We can take one question if anybody has. Or else, do we have any questions? Yeah, we have one question. We can take one question there. Yeah. Hi. For a designer, how much of interface design is involved in BUI? So I'm not sure what you mean by interface design in the traditional sense, but I can tell you this for any skill or any voice experience, I think the designer plays the most important role, right? Because I still think, I still say that tech is the easy part. And this is something that users are still not used to or it's new. So designers actually play the most important part. And it's all about interaction design at the end of the day. Like my colleague often says, like always start with people and not computers when it comes to conversational interfaces. And this has actually opened up like this entire new job market. So now you have like dialogue designers or voice BUX people and stuff, which are completely new job description in itself, right? Where you're really sort of studying the interaction between a user and a voice user interface, which is completely different from like HCI in like a traditional screen-based interface. So I'd say it's very important. And it still falls under interaction design just that with a voice interface. I'm confused because it involves a lot of machine learning, data science, and a lot of other stuff. But we know the traditional way of design is no more involved, right?  So that is a question. So I wouldn't quite agree with it being a complete shift, right? Because as a traditional designer, you looked at like say a website and you'd say, okay, how to make this website the most user-friendly website for my user. And you're doing pretty much the same thing just via voice. The good thing is a lot of the tech stuff is taken care of by either the Alexa Cloud or by like the tech team. So you don't, as a designer, you really don't have to worry about the machine learning, about the data science, about any of that stuff, right? Your core focus is on providing that voice user interface for your user, right? At no point as a designer, I'm like, okay, how do I do the machine learning algorithms for this? Because all of that is taken care of by the Alexa Cloud and not just with Alexa with any other system as well. So you're really focusing on, okay, what are my users going to tell Alexa and how is my Alexa skill going to help the user complete a task? But that is again the job of data scientist or a job of machine learning. Again, that is the tech, right? So like, okay, let's take the trip planner. They define all of those things, right? They define what the user should speak and all of that. Which is a wrong thing, right? It's basically like getting your engineering team to do the user interface in your app. You know what happens when that happens, right? So it's the same thing. So I'm saying that skills or, you know, building for voice needs designers to actually get that experience, right? You don't have your engineering team do that. But that is how even, you know, the coding happens, you know, we write high level coding and all that. That's because we have defined our C or C++. There are definitions like, you know, what should be written and all of that. So that is what even coders do. Yeah. That is not given by the designers. But now if we say that, you know, we have the designers have to say what should be done and all of that. Then again, the tech team will have a tough time. No, not quite. So again, let's look at front end and backend, right? On a traditional screen-based device, the front end is what the user sees. So if I go to like the Hasgeek website, for instance, you see like an eyesight, the menus, et cetera. And all that is sort of designed by the design team, right? So the design like, okay, I want these colors. I want this menu. I want this interaction to book a ticket. It's the same way with the voice user interface. There's a front end and a backend. The front end is anything a user says to the skill. So in my previous example, that conversation is the front end part. The backend is like that, that pure backend making a call to some API that you have, which is taken care of by the tech team. That is not related really to the design. I mean, it is obviously that it works in conjunction with each other, but that's not something you really need to worry about. You really need to worry about the front end, which is okay. This is how my user is talking to the skill. This is what my skill is going to respond to help the user, et cetera. So I'd say it's, designers still play a very important part. Thank you. Do we have time or am I? We can take one more question if we have. Do we have more questions? All right, I guess not. So I'll be off stage if anyone's interested. So thank you. Thank you so much.


Welcome to the first item of business. This afternoon is time for reflection and our timeframe reflection leader today is Father Andrew Garton, priest of St Davitt's Catholic Church in Delceith and St Luke and St Anne's Mayfield. Members of the Scottish Parliament thank you for this time. Cs Lewis has told us that if we are to act well, reflection must always come first. When you wake up each morning, he says, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals, and the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back, in listening to that other voice, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. What a beautiful description of the purpose of reflection, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. C.S. Lewis knew that it didn't just happen, that it really was a job, a task, being attentive not to the noisiest voice, but to the true voice. C. Margaret of Scotland understood that as well, just up the road in the castle nearly a thousand years ago. The court of Malcolm must have been a noisy place. So many voices, influences clamouring for attention. C. Margaret took time each day to reflect, to listen to that other voice, to let that other life come flowing in, and she found that voice, that life in the gospels, the accounts of the things that Jesus said and did, and her book of the gospels can still be seen in a library in Oxford. It was reflecting on this book that Margaret found the inspiration and the energy to act as she did, every day of her life finding people who had nothing, not keeping her distance but washing their feet, giving them food and clothing, filling the hall in the castle with people she'd found, giving them warmth and nourishment. Invite those who cannot repay you. She'd read that in her book and it wasn't just a voice to listen to but life, a stronger life, not just an idea but the energy to carry that idea through. C. Malcolm watched Margaret and he saw a precious light coming into this country through her. There's a story that Margaret was once unable to find her gospel book. Eventually she came upon Malcolm just sitting, holding the book in his hands. Although Malcolm himself was illiterate, unable to read, somehow he knew that this book was precious. It made his wife the person she was. She listened to the voice she found there. As he held her book, Malcolm somehow began to sense the value of reflection for Margaret and for Scotland.


The following is a presentation of TFNN. The TFNN Bull Bear Trading Hour. Every trading day, live at 10 a.m. Eastern. Call now, toll free at<PHONE_NUMBER> or internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. The TFNN Bull Bear Trading Hour. Now, Tommy and Tommy O'Brien. Welcome, folks. Appreciate you growl at a problem with us here. We have the Dow Industries down 197. Nasdaq got 53. S&P's down 21. Gold contract up $4.40. Trading at 12.81 an ounce. You get Silver up 8 cents. $14.40 an ounce. Light Sweet Crew. That's taking a hit this morning. Down at Buck 40. $57.74. I heard the update was down to 57.20. Somewhere like there, yeah. Big numbers. Yes. Notes and bonds, folks. Bottom line. Higher price, lower yield in a huge way, by the way. Ten-year note up 11.6. Trading 125.23. That's yielding 2.2 right now. 30 a bond of 28 at 152.29. King dollar. King dollar up 138 at 97.980. The euro is at 111 to 1 US dollar. The yen is at 109. And the pound is out here at 126 to 1 US dollar. Let's go over to our man, Mr. Kevin Hinks, a TD Ameritrade Think of Swim, as we do each Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And don't forget, folks, every trading day right here, outstanding program, 11 to 12 each in standard time. If you want to understand option strategies, futures, great program. If you haven't test-driven yet, the Think of Swim platform, real easy to do, come over to our website at TFNN. Hit the banner. Bring it up to a lot of trade paper money, along with Kevin and his team, each and every trading day. Kevin Hinks, what's going on? Good morning, Tom. Good morning, Tommy. You know, this whole morning that was already starting out to be pretty interesting is going to get a little more interesting. Yeah. I think with this news that Mueller is going to make a comment here at 11 Eastern, which is 10 o'clock Chicago time, 11 year guys' time, I think this market's going to wait and see what he says. And so that could be another leg in either direction, frankly, for this market. So, you know, in a day where it's already a big move, things might get a little more dicey. Yes. And, you know, as you were coming back from Florida yesterday, right? Yes, I was. If you didn't see this or know this, right? What happened yesterday at the close, Kevin, when you later on, if you pull this up on your Think of Swim platform, what do you see this? What happened, folks, at five or four last night is that a portfolio got sold and it was a monster. There's not one equity, a major equity that you can pull up, Kevin, that didn't do either 10 to almost 20% of the volume for the whole day. Wow. Oh, this is crazy, Kevin. When I was live on the air when this came across, we ended up doing 1.4 billion inside the NYSE and we did inside the NASDAQ, okay, we did 2.3 billion, but if five or four, those numbers were like really small because it was still almost a holiday, right? Sure. And then what I did, the next hour, I had pulled up almost every stock and it was like the last trades, you could see it. It was crazy, man. I wonder if there was some type of market on close unwind. There was an unwind, I know, man. I just had to bring it up because it's unusual that you see that. I went from all the Dow stocks, every single one of the Dow stocks, every single one of that, I went to about 30 of the NBX100 stocks. It was pretty extensive, man. Someone is very happy this morning, I can tell you that. Especially if you think about it because it's not the end of the month, it's not the end of the quarter, right? I mean, it was a Tuesday, the beginning of a week. Kind of interesting. It'll be interesting if we can find out what that was. We'll see if some people here can do some research on that. No, totally. When I was looking at it, let's picture if we're all money managers, you're still up 18%. I was looking at it and I was like, hold it, man. It's June 1st and it's like, if someone wants to get out, you're up 18%. That's a lot of money, man. Maybe someone just said, okay, this is it, man. Maybe get out. No one would be expecting that. You know what I mean? It's like, okay. So who's on the other side of it? But it's pretty intense, man. And you're right. A lot of people, Tom, if you asked them, especially with the way 2018 ended, if they could take 18% higher in 2019, would they take it? I bet most of them would have said yes. Oh, big time. You're right. So what you could see here is a second half of the year where this gets just a little choppy. It doesn't mean it's going to sell off. Corrections are all different shapes and sizes. Right. But yeah, I mean, someone chose to lock in some money at these levels. That's the dumbest thing in the world if your belief is that this market could go lower here. Right. And when you bring this up, when you bring the market up in general folks, I just think we get a monster consolidation. Well, the problem could be some money managers that the bottom of the consolidation is the December low. So it just depends on where you end up next December. Do you know what I mean? It's like, okay, we could end up at the highs, but guess what? You could end up at the lows too. And they're getting paid to run money. So it's like, hey, they're probably saying, hey, I'm pretty close to the highs right now, man. Yeah, the bar market with their expectations of rate movement in the second half of the year, they're telling you something. So if a slowdown is imminent or on the horizon, that 18% might look good at the end of the year. I'd take 18 every year. We were talking about TEPA. It's hard to even comprehend how that guy could compound 25% a year since what, 94? 93. I mean, that's unbelievable, man. Yeah. If you're going to get returns like that, he uses options. Yes. That's the first thing that pops into my mind is he uses options either to covered call strategies or cash secure puts. I don't know what it, I don't have a forensic look at his account, but I would bet someone with returns like that on a consistent basis is using options. No, I'd agree, because they had an article yesterday and we were going through in 2000 he went down like the rest of the market. Not as much, about 25%, but he came back dramatically. And the same with 2007. He went down, but then he came back dramatically. That totally makes a lot more sense now. Yeah, no one's going to go, when you have total market sell-off, there's very few people are going to come out of that unscathed. It's just a matter of where you're presenting yourself to over-achieve when the market does recover. Yes. There's no doubt. This is what's so cool about options folks. What does happen in downdrafts like that? Well, those calls the calls basically no one wants them, so the market is skewed anyway, do you know what I mean? The puts are expensive. The call is like, you want to buy a call? Here you go, take all you want. And then at the highs, of course, it's just the opposite. So when someone does turn and that article even said that he has big contrarian bets, for sure. His volatility was higher than the market too. So it could be a lot of things that he added to and it depends how he leveraged that account. It'd be interesting to know to find that out though. No, there's no doubt, no doubt.  I'm pretty impressed by dicks, which everything we've seen in terms of the retail sector and everything for them to beat and guide, that's pretty impressive. Now, it's been beat up a little bit, but that's a good comeback by them. No, there's no doubt. Folks, right here, 45 minutes to now. Kevin, you have a great one, safe one. We look forward to the show. Thanks for having me out, guys. Thanks, Kevin. Stay right there, folks. Crombie and I are coming right back. Our phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Coming right back. The Taz Profile Scanner is the most revolutionary piece of trading software that you will ever try. Wouldn't you like to approach the markets with confidence? As you begin your trading day, it's likely that you'll be faced with lots of decisions. In order to make the best decision, the first thing you'll need is a strategy that will help you minimize your risks. Whether we're in a bull or bear market, a good strategy is to have the tools needed to help you scan and analyze the markets before you trade. The Taz Profile Scanner constantly scans and filters over 2,500 global financial markets, such as stocks, ETFs, commodity futures, and forex. 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TFNN has launched our brand new website. You can still visit us at the same tfnn.com URL, but when you do, you'll see a new and improved homepage with a much simpler navigation, whether you're watching Tiger TV live in high definition or just accessing your newsletter subscriptions. We even have new pricing in six months and yearly options. Check out the new tfnn.com now and experience all the upgrades. tfnn.com educating investors. Call now toll free at 1-877-927-6648 internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER> Folks, Dow. Dow is down 157. We get the Nasdaq off 34. S&Ps are down 16 and we get that 10-year nose. Because this is something else. You talk about a fast move, folks. This is pretty amazing, actually. So we're 2.22 and what, five days ago you were 2.43. Yeah, about two tenths of a percent. Amazing. Then if we take a look at this, what you're going to see, what's glaring at us now is that 2%. The top of the 2.01, the top of that is 2.16. Now, we break that. Then your bottom line is going to dig into 1.7. So, I suspect it's got to take a little break. We'll see when it gets there. But it has basically volume behind the move. It has all of the above. The amount of volume is that it was incredible. And what had happened is that on Friday the CTFC had come out with the every Friday they come out with the longs and shots inside the future market. And what had happened is that look at that, 814,000 contracts in a 30-year, which you don't see that. That's yesterday, right? But that's my point. The amount of volume that came in here and the amount of volume that came in the 10-year with the story on the CTFC, I didn't look at the 30-year bond, but on the 10-year bond, that was the most amount of shot positions that they reported at the close of Friday since November of 2017. 4.2 million contracts. So, we keep going back and forth, though. You keep saying on Friday and then we jump to Monday, though, right? Because what I'm talking about is the CTFC reports on Friday how many people have shot the 10-year bond and it was the biggest shot position since November of 2017. So, you can see why people got to close their positions. They're on the wrong side of this trade. So, bottom line is that these rates are going lower, but they're going lower very quickly. If we take a look at the Fed fund futures, September just got over 50, 61. For a cut, yeah. Which is pretty intense, man. Look at December, it's 86. October, 71. So, and we take a look at the world rates. We're still I'm still high. You get 2.2. Germany's in the negative. Netherlands, Switzerland's been in the negative forever. Pretty wild, man. Some of the higher volume equities out here. Let's take a look at them. So, you got... Well, Abercrombie will go over there for a second. It actually will stop there because you know what's interesting is that this stock already came back from the dead. So, when you pull up the chart it's really not that bad looking. It looks like it's a monster consolidation. I wouldn't want to be in it, but when you actually pull this up it doesn't look to me like... I get things that they have to straighten out, but it looks like the... Well, actually when I bring it up longer. I just probably brought it up for 10 years, folks, and it doesn't look as well. No. The other thing I'll just add to it in this sector, right, where you better pay attention when things change quickly in terms of, you know, you're either going to succeed or you're going to fail when you're talking about retail clothing. And then if the taff's going to place this is what's going to happen. After 25% folks is going to be on clothing. So, they're going to get hurt. I think that's... Is that June 1st? I'm going to get to find out what it is. So, whatever day that kicks in, if in fact that ends up kicking in, that's going to be a problem for retailers in general.  Actually, this actually wants to go to $12 to $8 near it, $19. And I wanted to see that. I heard the flagship stores. I want to know what the stores are. Let's see. Yeah, maybe try that one. So, let's see. Yeah, it's plunged 24%. Same-store sales rose 1% company-wide. Trailing at 1.4. Yeah. They have the Hollister brand, I guess, which targets teens. So, sales growth really starts to taper off. So, I think when you're talking about younger people, maybe bringing them in line for future customers, the whole deal. So, that's one of the more important brands that they're selling there to the younger customers that, you know, yeah, it's growing at 2%, but a 3.4% growth was priced into that stock. And then there's the three more flagships, including Soho, Hollister, NYC. Yeah. This will bring the total of flagship closures to five since two years ago, 2017, and more could be coming. That's a big thing, too, because it's going to take a lot of time to make sure that they're selling it. Yeah. That's a big thing, too, because this is all about being cool, right? Then those stores, like the big stores, teens being cool, right? Yeah, I mean, in general, right? In terms of, like, if you're a high-flying company doing well, you don't need to close your store in Soho in New York City, because that doesn't even have to be a profit maker, because it's a brand-awareness type deal, but they're saying, no, no, no, we can't handle that right now. I think we're going to call her. Paul, and Henderson, Nevada. What's going on, brother? What's happening, gentlemen? Good morning to you guys. Good morning, Paul. I called about Litecoin and Ripple, but this morning I traded that A&F. Yeah. Great setup for a day trade. Took it short, right at as it broke underneath 20 bucks. It had a clean pre-market level. And it also had the daily level right there at about 20. And then a quick flush. You got a quick point out of that and see what's next. It looks like it's going to break again, maybe down to 18 today. Paul, just give yourself about, I think I can give you about another 24 hours. I thought when I was looking up as a producer to send this in, you were going to be calling about the minerals, okay, the rare minerals, because you are going to be trading those in a second. So, yeah. Yeah, let's do the Litecoin first at the cryptos in general, but then we'll go through into these. What has happened, folks, is since you know the the other 25% TAF got announced the rare minerals have taken off in a huge way and a lot of them traded overseas, but I was looking at them this morning. There's action in those things, and so you're going to hear a lot more about them. I did already. So, Litecoin, let's take a look at Litecoin out here. So, we're 116, huh? You know what, when I called in about a month ago, when that thing had like a really clean pattern at $70, I hope some of the tigers were able to take advantage of that, because it's up about 70% Look at that. We also talked about Ripple that day, and Ripple as well up about in the last month 55%. Man, they look nice. It hit the first Fibonacci the 2-3. So, part of my trade is getting peeled off now, but I'm expecting to look... Congratulations, man. It looks like it wants to pump. It's a different type of trading with long time, but they move just so fast. This time, they're a little slower, but they're still pumping good. See, it's interesting that when you hear in there, folks, it's nice when you trade the same vehicles, because then you do get a better understanding of how they like to move. Stay right there, Paul. Tommy and I are coming right back. Our phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Be right back, folks. Hi, folks. Tom O'Brien here. If you'd like to get my daily newsletter you'll have time to sign up for a 30-day free trial. Every morning by 9.30 I send out my morning letter to subscribers with market commentary on a variety of markets, currencies, and commodities to keep investors up-to-date on the day's trading action. Included in Market Insights are specific buy and sell recommendations for stocks, ETFs, and even options, which stops and price targets included for every trade in my newsletter. If you'd like to try my newsletter risk-free for 30 days, then head over to the front page of TFNN and you'll find Market Insights under Trading Newsletters. I use my years of trading experience to bisect and dissect the market every morning and give my subscribers the most important information they need to know for the day ahead. I even issue afternoon updates for my subscribers whenever warranted with important market action. I'm always scouring the market for the next great trading opportunity. Sign up for your 30-day free trial to my daily newsletter Market Insights today by visiting the front page of TFNN.com. Well, go get them, folks. The least resistance is David White's daily trading newsletter, and if you're looking for active trading ideas, then now's a perfect time for a 30-day free trial to this powerful daily trading advisory service. David uses his years of trading experience to offer his subscribers his trading ideas each morning in his path of least resistance newsletter. Using a combination of equity trades along with options, David keeps his subscribers up-to-date with all pertinent market information with intraday afternoon updates when warranted. Don't miss out on this great chance to get a 30-day free trial to David's daily newsletter, the Path of Lease Resistance, with no obligation to pay anything. David has been delivering solid recommendations for his subscribers recently, and if you'd like to see the type of newsletter he delivers every morning, then visit the front page of TFNN and you'll find the Path of Lease resistance under Trading Newsletters. For all the details and to start your 30-day free trial today, go to tfnn.com now. TFNN is excited about our new software charting program, the Art of Timing the Trade Chart. In collaboration with Tom O'Brien and using his best-selling book, The Art of Timing the Trade, your ultimate trading mastery system, David White has programmed an outstanding piece of software that will complement any trader's methodology. Using this first-of-its-kind program, the Art of Timing the Trade Chart allows you to scan thousands of stocks including Gartly's, ABC's, Butterflies, and much more. The Art of Timing the Trade Chart is designed to help you when scouring the markets for stocks just beginning to form the trading patterns that many investors spend days, weeks, or even months searching to find. And right now, we're offering licenses available at only $79 a month. We are so confident that you're going to love this new charting software that will even give you a 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee. With this piece of software, get your copy of The Art of Timing the Trade Charts today by visiting tfnn.com. This segment is brought to you by Think or Swim. For more information, just click the Think or Swim banner on the front page of tfnn.com. Welcome back, folks. Dow. Dow is down 143.  S&Ps are down 13.5. I'm Henderson Nevada. We're talking cryptos out here. So you're going to take a little off the table, which is always smart. Let's start peeling it off, but I think that it's going to hit the 382, which would be 174, which seems still like from here. I mean, it just broke. There were some really good trades over the weekend. Some really nice four-hour patterns that formed. But it looks like this thing, it looks pretty good. I like this pattern. I'm expecting the 382, but I can see that's a good pattern. Yeah, no doubt I can see that. Good action.  We thought that the long weekend.  With the cryptos, right? That we could be a good weekend, right? Yeah, and you got Bitcoin 8700 holding Strongland. 8700, yeah. So here. You're going to bring up... Now, you're going to have to hunt these a little bit. So this one here is in Australia, all right? Lioness Corporation. And you're going to see the low for the EFOX is 148. The high is 278. This is a minor. And you're going to see, though, from... What is that? March 25th? Yes. March 25th, the stock's at $1.55. You're at $2.80 now. These things are running, man. And I'll show you something. Watch this. What's the ticker on that, Tom? It's L-Y-C in Australia. In Australia. But here, I'll get you the list. You'll be able to hunt it. There's a few of them that can trade here. And you can see the last time that this ran, it ran from 75 cents in February of 2009 up to $27. Doesn't mean it'll do that. But this thing's running, man. Now, watch. If I go like this, when I put an RV on this, folks, what it shows is that all these other equities that are inside of that whole business... Looks like they're all in China. Yeah, no, no, no. A lot of them are. They are. And that's where the retaliation's going to be. Oh, of course. But you're going to hear a lot more about this, because when these things... I remember the last time they ran, they ran and they fell apart as soon as everything went back together again. Do you know what I mean? But they're really important, because they only... evidently, a lot of the phones indeed, the things that we actually need, you need a small amount of whatever this rare minerals are. And so when they run, if someone is going to try to basically, you know, not sell them to outside of China, because China has evidently the most of these on earth that are under-earth so far. Yeah, I guess they're everywhere, so China has the ones where they can get out of the ground at the best price to be. Exactly. Exactly. So... Nice. I'm going to look into these right here. I'm always looking for new volatile instruments to trade. Exactly. Exactly. You got to love them. Oh, cool, man. Well, that's... Keep an eye on these cryptos. They look hot, so we'll see how this shakes out over the next couple weeks. We love your feedback, man. Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks, Paul. Take care, man. Have a safe one. Let's go to Mark and Bedford. Mark, what's going on, brother? Not much, Tommy. Tommy, how are you? Morning, Mark. Great. You have a good weekend? Hey, I had a great weekend. Hey, you know what? Paul was just on... I hope he's still listening. Last week, he told you about that website, what the app... Life App or something like that. I thought, and I was... As I was listening to it, I said, you know, that would be a real great thing if you and Tommy talk to them and see if you could do a cross-marketing. You put a link to their website on your web page, and they put one to TFNN because... on their website, because all you guys are dealing money, and it would be a great cross-marketing kind of an opportunity for you guys. It's an idea. Listen, man, we appreciate the idea. I'll give it a look for sure. The cross-marketing works, there's no doubt about it. Paul, I want to talk about volatility, and I want to talk about the real volatility in the VIX. If you look at the VIX and the T-VIX, it looks like the VIX has sold off. Now, the market is coming back up also, but if I look at it, it's not proportional, and this is telling me that the people who trade the VIX anyway probably don't think this downturn is going to hold. Tom, what do you think of that? Well, okay, we got to... I've been through this before, and I just can remember the whole deal of how this works, because you're having us bring up the VXX, right? Yeah, well, I trade the T-VIX. Right. So what happens is this, I believe these, let me just look at that, these are different vehicles. The... Okay, so the T-VIX is a short-term ETN for Credit Suisse. T-VIX is two times. That's the most important part of that. The VXX was just the single, I believe. Right. Okay, so it's trading the the SP500-VIX short-term futures index. The note will provide investors with a cash payment at the scheduled maturity or early redemption based on two times the performance of the underlying index, the SP500-VIX short-term futures index. Right. So there it is right there. Yes. So that's not the VIXX, because the VIXX is the options index versus the futures index. Yeah, both. That's what... I've been through... You see what I'm saying? So... Yes, I do. It's not going to have the same percentage moves as the VIXX. Yeah, that's right. One is the futures, the volatility in the futures. The other is the volatility in the option market. Yes. Okay, well, I'm thinking comparing... I was thinking about comparing the T-VIX in reference to the down the S&P. My strategy or my thinking here is that in looking at the T-VIX, it looks like it's come way back come back down and that's telling me that the people who are trading the T-VIX anyway do not think that this downturn that started right at the closure today was going to hold. This is where you have to get into the... You have to dig more into the... As to what months this is predicated on, the short-term futures index to see whether it's trading the same months as the VIXX is, okay? Okay. They're different vehicles. That's the way that, you know, I'd look at it. More than like the close, but they are different vehicles. All right. Yeah. I get what you're saying. What does happen inside of these, though, is that the futures are totally different than the option market, you know? So there's probably different strategies flat out. What I don't know is just as I said, that's the underlying deal. Do you know what I'm saying? If we look at this today, let me just do this, okay? So we get the T-VIXX up and I put this up. Okay, so we can see that 25-50 back down. I have the VIXX already up on Thicker Swim. I just want to go back to... There you go. That way. Yeah, so it almost traded the same. It's going to be different percentages. It's going to have the same general movement. It's taking the Dow and the S&P. So... Well, the VIXX is only trading off the S&P, though, Mark, just so... The VIXX is only off the S&P. Just keep that in mind. They come down more percentage-wise than the Dow was. And what that's telling me is that the people who... We'll be right back. Stay there. Right back. 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That's TFNN.com and hit watch Tiger TV for the latest market information. Welcome back folks, down 179. Nasik is off 43. S&P is off 18. We're talking about Mark from Bedford and we're talking about the T-Vix, the Vix in general. What you have Mark is that as Tommy is just saying that either one of those have nothing to do with the Dow. They don't trade off the Dow at all. So you just got to keep that in mind. Do you know what I'm saying in general? Yeah, exactly. They're both S&P, one's the future, one's the option chain. Yeah, different subject. I was listening to your show last night in the second half of the second hour and you were comparing all those stocks that got slam last night in that last minute trade. Right. I was thinking, it would be great to save that list that you did at all those stocks and look at the firings when they come out to try and find out who was the big seller. That's a great idea. Well, it'll be saved right on our YouTube channel, man. May 28th, you can go check it out whenever you want. They're always there. We'll do that, man. That's wild. We'll do that for a day after Memorial Day weekend, Tuesday, May 28th. Boom. Mark it down. Got to love it, man. Hey, I like the weather down there. It's hot. It's a little warm, but hey, it's beautiful. It's been a great winter, man. From November to this weekend and, you know, the weather comes in Memorial Day. So Memorial Day, you're good. Then it's hot. Here we go. Hey, you have a great one to say for, Mark. You too, Tom. Thanks so much, man. Thanks, Mark. Take care, man. Now, let's go over to our men, Mr. Teddy Kegstad as we do each and every Wednesday. Wednesday? It is Wednesday. That's right. And every trading day, folks, you can reach Teddy at forex-trading-unlocked.com. That's forex-trading-unlocked.com. Teddy Kegstad, what's going on, brother? Oh, I'm just trying to absorb what's going on with the currency markets with this holiday week that we have. That's no doubt, man. We saw that dollar, that dollar spike tile last week, gave it up, and it's not done yet. It looks like it wants to go after that 98085 again. It's like, oh, my God. Like, you know, when are you going to give it up, man? Right. Well, I think the interesting ones to watch right now is the U.S. dollar yen and the Euro-U.S. dollar. Right now, those are the ones that seem to be definitely very bearish and looking to make some lows. The U.S. dollar yen trade, like I have to say, I was looking at the charts on the weekly and the monthly, and especially the daily, momentum looks like it's just weak. The U.S. dollar really seems to be very strong against the yen, excuse me, weak against the yen. I think it's going to remain so probably over the next week or so. And I like the Euro yen, I think that's the Euro-U.S. dollar I think is going to probably test the lows again this week. So there's just, the dollar is, in those two markets, that's where it's active and moving. I would look at the pound dollar I think right now, especially with the Theresa May leaving the U.K., that's a whole new variable there. But I think her replacement is going to be just more of the same. So I think you're going to have kind of just a static trade, and so it's kind of putting the place with the new change of leadership. And outside of that, the dollar strength seems to just kind of keep trying to edge further and further right now against all the lesser majors. No, there's no doubt, man. It's pretty wild just watching the whole thing shake out. I mean, Britain, they're like in a mess. Welcome to last like three years, right? Seriously, man. I mean, it's like, you get plenty of folks over there that they seem that, okay, we don't want anything to happen to the currency, which would be pretty hard to comprehend, you know, if you don't get a deal and they really do a hard Brexit. I guess we'll just count down again to, you know, the the next couple of weeks we'll see how they phase in the new leadership and how now I honestly think it's just more of the same as far as what the banter is going to be. Yes, I don't think that I don't think that her stepping down is a sign that there's going to be a resolution any faster to be quite honest with you. Oh, no, I agree because I think that, listen good, you know, people always can say no real easy. Well, okay, tell me what you're going to do then. Right. And that's that's what we had. No, no, no. Okay, good. Now it's in the ball, you know, because what you want, right? Sure. Yeah, sure. Exactly. So you guys know that I mean this is nothing new here that we're looking at with them, you know, so I would I would definitely say that anyone that's trading it just be very careful with the moves. You're probably going to get some vacuum moves. Now any obviously any type of agreements are good coming to terms at the table between the EU and the UK will probably see a little rally in the dollar trade. But I don't think that our trade things with China has any impact on that unless there's a major obviously move in the dollar, that would be indicative of making the pound have a reaction to it. But I think you're really going to see the pound just really drift over the next like few weeks as they absorb the new leadership and try and come to the table again and we'll see with the with the G20 meeting coming up as well. There may be some pressures with this saying, hey, you guys, we need we have a lot of other things on the table here. It's time to start to come to the, you know, make some kind of resolution. Right. And then of course we have Europe going on vacation, right? I mean that starts kind of you know, whether it's now the next few weeks and like kind of six weeks, they kind of lay low, right? Sure. Sure. Now the one thing we've been talking a lot about is the dollar Swiss relationship. Yeah. Last week they did after we talked on Thursday and Friday, they did start made a newer move low. They're a little bit about dollars bounce back a little bit over the past couple sessions, but it's just a corrective move right now the way I see it. So that signal is that with the politics aside between what's going on with the UK and the EU, I think that there's definitely going to see some weakness in the dollar against these major currencies because of the way the Swiss is reacting, you know, and I think this is the precursor, but it's probably more setting a range trade, not like a big change in trend. Does that make any sense? Yeah, no, it does. I can see that. The, it seems that, I mean the dollar has been creeping against everything for a while, but it's only been creeping too, right? I mean it seems like this consolidation is still in place. Sure. And the dollar Canada trade is something to look at too because you have the Bank of Canada where if they have any change in monetary policy when they meet, which I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think it's next week. So if there's any change in their monetary policy speak, then you may see some reaction in the dollar Canada, but otherwise that bull is kind of like looking for newer move highs. So that's definitely strong. Yeah, I love it. Listen folks every trading day you can catch on Antti at forex-trading-unlocked.com that's forex-trading-unlocked.com and guess what? These currencies are, markets are moving, but currencies are definitely moving too, man. I mean it's going to be interesting watching this thing shake out, particularly the yen because it's, you know, I like it when the yen gets stronger, for some reason that gold market gets stronger, you know, so the correlation is just direct as you can get, which is pretty cool. It's not going to stay still. The yen, I think the yen actually might be one of the big movers over the next couple months. Good. Get it stronger, will you man? Go buy some of this. Thanks, man. Hey listen, you have a great week, safe week, and we look forward to speaking the next Wednesday, Teddy. Thanks guys. You have a good one too. Appreciate it. Thanks, Teddy. Have a great one. Have a safe one. Market-wise out here, you know, you get the volatility, no doubt. We have a nice spike up to that, you know, 27, well, the futures were only down about 13, we just went back down 19. We get the doubt on 200, Nasik down 44, of course the market is waiting to see what the model is going to say in 10 minutes, you know, I think it's going to make any difference, but we'll find out. Stay right there folks, come right back. I'm certain you are or strive to be one of the best of the best at everything you do in life. It's the most common trait that we tigers and tigers share. 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Get your 2 week free trial to Basil's newsletter the opening call today by visiting TFNN.com. This segment is brought to you by Think or Swim.  If you get over and look at Johnson & Johnson and understand that Johnson & Johnson even had a subsidiary that was in the opiate business but evidently it is. Johnson & Johnson is down $6.26. It looks like they have a subsidiary that's called Jensen. Yeah. Jensen unit. And right now you got a trial starting in Oklahoma. So opioids we're talking about here. Yes. And this is quite a hit man. Yes. Looks like it wants lower price. Yeah. I mean I can get down 126 and a half. You're at 130 right now. Definitely pretty wild and market wise out here you know we'll see where this baby shakes out but what you do have is that if you go take a look at the Dow Industrial's you're going to see this is quite a break. I mean so this is a big day out here today folks if we take a look at this and you just you know bottom on is that you're looking at the break that we just have here I just take this I do it this way. You're going to see that we just broke it's that February of this year right? Yes February 12th. So we'll see if we get price spread. It need it need to be down to about 400 today for real price spread. This is you know you're not 200 but I'm just saying if you happen to look at the chart it's just slightly underneath it which you could get a rejection. Sure. But you know. Yeah. And we'll see you know part of that 11 o'clock just to give people a preview I mean the DOJ announcing Mueller's coming out so I would not expect any surprises contrary to upsetting the president if the DOJ is literally announcing his and no questions by the way. No questions no questions. Yeah. No. So it's gonna you know I agree there's no doubt because I think I believe he's still an employee of the Justice Department until they release on a certain date. I would date it. That date is soon. I would assume so because the DOJ announced it if he wasn't. All right. They had no business doing it so yeah.  Thanks thanks man. Well don't get him folks.


Hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel Daniel Rose here I want to record another video about the XA40 professional camcorder from Canon and what I want to talk about today I just got in the post very forticiously before the end of the week my first XLR shotgun microphone and this is the Boya BYBM 6060. Now the purpose of this video is if you've just picked up the XA40 and you're looking to buy a shotgun I just want to tell you or show rather why you should probably go for a compact shotgun they do exist they're also known as short shotguns so the first thing is like this camera is really really small so it's something that's hard to judge by youtube videos or product photos exactly how small this is so you can see there from the bottom of the viewfinder to the with the lens on or the lens hood on that's 23 centimeters and just getting to the lens it's probably only actually 19 centimeters for reference here's my hand I have a normal sized hand I think and like you know it's so compact I can literally hold it top handle to bottom with my hand so Canon really don't exaggerate when they say that they put the pro camcorder look the top handle etc into a really small form factor and that's great for portability but it does present a problem when you're buying microphones because your standard shotgun microphone is built for either a boom or just a bigger or if it's you know if it's to be used for on camera stuff it's just intended for a bigger camera I mean you can just see that is not right right that is that shotgun microphone is too long so I did ask on reddit for recommendations for compact XLR shotgun microphones I did get a couple of recommendations I will put those in the description please be aware at least at the time I'm recording this I'm not putting up affiliate links I'm just kind of trying to help people in the right direction who are also interested in camcorders so measuring my shotgun this guy is 28 so that's actually longer than the camcorder and that's not by any strategy a very very long shotgun microphone it's a little longer than some of the more expensive sannheiser stuff but I just want to show you guys two things firstly here's just a little pro tip as they call it um this shotgun mount that comes with the xa40 and 50 etc it actually doesn't tighten very far this is as tight as it'll go so what I did it wouldn't fit this would not fit snugly and what I did here if you can make the distinction I wrapped around this in black insulation tape black just you know sort of keep the appearance looking good and I had to go for quite a while until it would add enough width or diameter I should say to the shotgun before it would fit snugly so that's just a quick tip for you guys and I'll just show you how this looks because the reason I bought this 60 shotgun was because I've just spent you know a lot of money on the camera and you know uh I'm going to save up a little bit before I can I can justify buying a 300 dollar um better compact sure shotgun microphone so I figured this will keep me going and then afterwards I'll have it for I guess booming or something so just want to show you what it looks like it's not the worst but it's also not the best so with the insulation tape it does fit really snugly you can see you know it's not going anywhere uh which is good and but it definitely just in proportion it just looks wrong I think um bear in mind as well that by the time you attach your XLR cable where it's the female uh you're going to be adding you know another bit here and that's it it just kind of two things it's a tracks from the portability of the camcorder this actually fits in my existing camera bag which is amazing because I didn't need to buy a new camera bag but when you add the extra length from the this shotgun microphone um it doesn't fit so that might be a concern for you and yeah it's just great to have something so portable and then to throw a big chunky mic um I think it's kind of dumb so yeah I definitely would recommend looking into portable options it does work one really really small and pedantic point but as this is kind of a pedantic point video I'll say it nevertheless this is the shortest XLR cable that I had in my uh camera bag I don't know how long it is I would guess approximately maybe it's 60 centimeters end to end yeah it's probably 60 but in any event that's already way too long you only need to go from the back of your microphone to the XLR port and as I said in my last video you want to use input one so you're talking about I mean again I'm using my hand here you're talking about a span of only this much it's really not that much ground to cover so you should also probably buy if your microphone doesn't come with an XLR cable or even if it does I would buy the shortest XLR that'll make that reach I think 30 centimeters would do it because they include the uh they usually include the attachments in the length uh you might even be able to get away with shorter so you might need to buy a couple to experiment with anyway I'm really happy to have a shotgun that I can now use with this and I can guess the advantage of using this over a 3.5 mil is that you have all your all the controls you might need on the hardware level you have your phantom power switch regular switch line-in switch automatic in control manual game control off on switch so versus using a 3.5 mil or an eighth shotgun which you can do you can attach it in here the advantage of using an XLR microphone is that if you're already using the top handle it's already there you can it can fit into your shotgun mine but more importantly that when you're out shooting and interviewing instead of fiddling around with levels on the LCD screen here you have access to all that at literally the touch of a button so I think that's a worthwhile enough advantage to go with an XLR mic over a 3.5 mil even though this guy can technically support both hope that was useful if you're looking at buying a microphone for your XA40 shotgun microphone I'll put a link in this description to the microphones the compact microphones that I found myself and was to help with reddit because there are a few on the market they're definitely more expensive than this $60 boya microphone but yeah if you have the money to go and buy one and definitely I think it's probably better to to get to get something that sites more appropriately for this camera than a big long shotgun that's just gonna look a bit a little bit OTT or whatever I hope this video is useful and if you want to get more videos from me on a whole bunch of different topics please feel free to subscribe thanks for watching