What3words divides the world into a 3 * 3-meter grid, each square is uniquely identified by three words which creates a global reference system that allows people to identify and navigate between these 3*3 meter squares using 3 words instead of longitude and latitude. Three words are easy to remember and provide an easy and effective way of communicating location to voice-enabled machines. Listen to this interview with one of the co-founders of what3words, Jack Waley-Cohen to learn more about the problems what3words is solving and the thought that goes into building a coordinate system for humans.
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In Conversation
From Translation to what3words
Daniel: Welcome Jack, welcome to the MapScaping Podcast. I’m so pleased to have you on today. I actually did an interview with one of your team members before, but the sound quality was just too poor and I could not get myself to publish it — so I am really pleased and really grateful that you took the time to do this interview with me today. You are the co-founder of a company called what3words, and you’re doing something really interesting around addressing, around the way we think about addressing. But before we dive into that, can you tell me how you got involved with this company, and what your background is?
Jack: It’s very nice to be here, nice to talk to you. I had been running a translation business for about eight years with a friend of mine, and I left that and was trying to take some time out. I started my own business which didn’t go particularly well, and my wife and I were about to have our first child, so life was kind of taking a new turn. And then Chris Sheldrick, who is one of the co-founders of what3words, who I hadn’t been in touch with for years — we’d been on the school chess team together in fact — got in touch with me and said, hey, I’ve got something of an idea brewing, I know you’ve grown a business before in the tech space, you know a bit about languages from your translation industry background, wouldn’t you have a chat about it? So we did, and I was instantly hooked. We started doing this startup thing where you get in the room and throw ideas around and work out whether you’re actually going to give some of your life over to it. So that was how I got involved.
Daniel: And what is it that you gave some of your life to? What is what3words?
Jack: What3words is a way to communicate locations very easily, in a very human friendly way. We essentially take latitude and longitude coordinates, which are not human friendly at all, and we add a layer of words to make them very easy to communicate. We have split the entire world into a massive grid of three meter by three meter squares — there are 57 trillion of those squares covering the land and sea of the entire planet — and to each one of those squares we’ve pre-allocated an address which is simply made up of three words from the English language. And in fact we’ve subsequently done it now in over 37 other languages as well.
Jack: So the what3words office address in London, in what3words terms, the three word address is ///filled.count.soap. That takes you to the unique square called filled.count.soap, which is just outside the entrance to the studio building where the what3words London office is located. So that is what what3words is, in a nutshell.
Why Three Words and Three Meters?
Daniel: So you’re providing us with a much easier way of navigating, of talking about space, and you divided the world up into this grid of three by three meter squares. Why did you choose three by three? Why not four by four or five by five?
Jack: Funnily enough, I was digging up some old emails the other day, because I was doing a talk to some people at the company on the what3words origin story, and going into perhaps more detail than I normally would, but it felt quite interesting. We discussed all of these things. We were thinking, should we use two words or four words, three meters, four meters, five meters? And there are all sorts of payoffs. In the end the very best balance we could find was three words, three meters by three meters. We contemplated other variations, but there were pros and cons to them all.
Jack: There’s something about the neatness of the three meter squares and the three words. Three words is an interesting one, because it is three units of information, and it’s well established through all sorts of scientific tests that humans can hold that amount of information very accurately in their short-term memory. And three meters by three meters is also an amount of space that is practical for most purposes, and is at the limits of the precision that standard mobile device GPS will help you with anyway. So, lots of factors, but in the end it seemed like a good balance.
Daniel: It seems like there’s a lot of crossover there, where the address is short enough that people can remember it, which I guess is a really big part of the problem you’re trying to solve. You’re trying to get away from latitude and longitude, and from the current addressing system, which can be quite complicated if you really stop and think about it — with completely different streets, perhaps even in several parts of the world, having the same name.
Jack: And just on that point, many countries in the world just don’t have a functional addressing system. And the repeated street names within one city can be extraordinary — I think Mexico City has 600 plus Juárez streets, so it gets pretty complicated.
From Last Mile to Last Meter
Daniel: In terms of the three meter by three meter accuracy that you can get from the system, that must be good enough for a great deal of the navigation challenges that we’re trying to solve. I could definitely imagine scenarios where it wouldn’t be good enough, where we need really high accuracy, but the system feels like it’s designed for people from the ground up.
Jack: That’s absolutely right, it is. There are plenty of use cases where a much higher degree of precision is going to be needed and you’re going to need professional grade equipment to get that kind of precision. But for the vast, overwhelming majority of human use cases, three meters by three meters is not a big amount of space. And we do expect people to use their eyes and look up from their devices occasionally. If you’re expected to find an apartment block, or house number 37, or a green door — once you’ve got to the three word address you’re going to look up, and it might be behind you, it might be to your front or to your left, but you’re going to see what you need to see when you get there without any difficulty. In the logistics industry they talk about the last mile problem; we think with what3words we can flip that — it becomes a last meter problem, which is quite a big difference.
Emergency Services, Cars and Voice
Daniel: Can you give us some examples of some use cases of people using this in the wild?
Jack: There are some very good use cases that we see in the UK at the moment, and in other countries, but I’ll focus on the UK, where the emergency services — which is very fragmented, there are many separate organizations working together to a lesser extent — but a very large number of the UK emergency services have started asking the people in their counties to be ready to give a three word address if they call in an emergency situation. There are times where that’s not needed, or times where other technology is more useful, but we’re hearing on a daily basis, certainly several times a week, real life examples of people who are contacting emergency services reporting issues where the most useful way in their particular circumstance to communicate their location is using a three word address. So that’s a really powerful and interesting use case, and it really captures the imagination, and saves people’s lives in real examples.
Jack: Another one is we have several car companies around the world who are implementing, or have implemented, what3words in their in-car navigation systems. That’s extremely powerful, because I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried using voice communication with a car with addresses — voice communication is really not a very good experience. In a car you really should be using voice instructions, because you shouldn’t be pressing buttons. What3words is absolutely designed for voice, and it’s very easy for us to configure with the automobile companies to get the three word addresses very clearly understood. So as an example, you can get into a very large number of Mercedes vehicles — all the new A-Classes and everything with the more recent updates on their in-car head unit system — and you can say “Hey Mercedes, navigate me to filled.count.soap”, or table.lamp.chair, as the case may be, whatever three word address you’re going to. And the in-car system will understand what you’re asking, and will fire up the navigation system and off you go, and very confidently you’re going to find the right spot.
Daniel: I’m glad you mentioned that about voice and gave some examples around that, because that’s one of the first things I thought of when I saw the system. I thought, wow, here’s a human system designed for us humans, and it seems to be designed for voice, because it’s so easy to say.
Jack: What3words is really at its best, and designed for, any communication of location that involves people. Machines talking to machines — fine, use 25 decimal places of lat-long for that and the machines will handle that just fine. But the minute a person gets involved you’ve got to make it easier. And humans to devices, humans to machines via voice, is so massively on the increase at the moment. It feels like we’re in a good place, that what3words is absolutely designed for, and optimized and further optimizable for, really good human to machine voice communication.
A Fixed System That Works Offline
Daniel: Correct me if I’m wrong, but this grid, this index that you’ve made and put over the whole world — I’m assuming that’s not going to change with time. So already you’ve solved one of the problems that we see with the current addressing system. Firstly it’s global, so this will exist everywhere. And secondly it’s not going to be updated. In Denmark for example we have a new street, a new neighborhood going in, and we either extend the addressing system by adding more numbers to the existing street, or we create a whole new street. This is happening constantly, and it’s a real struggle to keep up with. Of course this gives all sorts of problems in terms of when you’re working with GIS, because so many things are attached to the street level address.
Jack: Absolutely. To answer your first point, yes, it is designed to be fixed like a proper coordinate system. Once we have released a three word address system in a particular language then it will not change, it’s fixed. We put in an enormous amount of work to get them as good as possible before we release it. And that gives the great advantage, as you say, that when new builds are put up — yes, they will eventually get street addresses, or extensions of the systems, and I think that’s important, to have traditional addressing — but the three word address, for a start, it’s already there. When the contractors are going there, or when the houses are first built and people need to go and have a look, you have a way to define it.
Jack: And secondly, honestly, even when a new build area, a new street, new houses have been added to the address system — who knows how long it takes to propagate into all the databases that people have, whether it’s the delivery company or the postal service or the electoral register, whatever it is. It can really take a long time to get those things out to all the other systems. So what3words is very effective, and the addressing is already done wherever you are in the world, so you can just start using it as soon as you need it.
Not Replacing Addresses
Daniel: One of the big things where I could see people might have a little bit of pushback on this is, firstly, you’re introducing a completely new system. We have longitude and latitude coordinates which machines use, we have the current traditional addressing system, and now we have this other system as well. And please don’t misunderstand me, I can see a lot of advantages with what you’re doing, but a huge disadvantage I could see is that you’re trying to change the culture. You’re trying to change the way we understand and relate to certain places. If I think about neighborhoods, for example — people buy into neighborhoods because there’s some perceived value with living in certain areas, and they attach a lot of that value to the name. And if you come along and say, well, this has a completely different name now — how are you solving those problems? It feels like there’s a huge education piece here, and a huge shift in the culture that needs to happen.
Jack: I think that’s a really valid point, and certainly one that we are extremely conscious and aware of. On the one hand we are not trying to replace existing addressing systems — we provide a very powerful complement to those addressing systems. We’re not trying to redefine what whole areas are known as, we’re not trying to stop people referring to their street names or their house numbers. But when you add a three word address to any of that contextual information, then you get that laser pinpoint precision that helps you once you’re in or near the area that you’re aiming for.
Jack: And you’re also right that education and behavior change is a big challenge for the adoption of any new system and any new technology. Most postcode systems were designed for horse and cart, or for delivery of mail, which isn’t really fit for the way people do things these days. So we think that the education we can do, and our customers do when communicating to their users, can really help people understand the value of a new system. And we’re seeing that in many countries around the world now — the UK is a particularly powerful example right now, and I told you about the emergency services use case. People get it. They see the real life examples about how it helps them, and then the behavior change starts to happen and the education takes a big step forward.
Daniel: I just want to shift gear a little bit now and talk about another side of this that I think is really interesting. I could imagine this being seen as a fantastic branding opportunity for people. Has anyone approached you saying, hey, I really want my brand name, or a certain set of words, on a specific location?
Jack: Yes, people do ask about that, and in fact we did trial something like that in the very early days of the company, but we stopped doing it for various reasons. One principally is that it does not provide a fixed system that works the same in every device or every implementation around the world. We think of what3words like a coordinate system, and coordinate systems shouldn’t change.
Jack: Something we haven’t mentioned so far which is relevant to this question is that the whole what3words system actually functions completely offline. It doesn’t require a connection to the what3words servers. So from that perspective it’s really important for the integrity of the system that nothing changes and that it is fixed. There are other reasons why we are not looking at customization — another one is to do with the voice communication. As soon as you start customizing and changing names you start getting into, very quickly, the problems that traditional address systems have with voice communication, where we can’t control the inputs, we can’t optimize, because we just don’t know what people are going to be saying. So we acknowledge that people are interested in it, but it’s not really a direction where we’re looking to go in right now.
Daniel: I’m really glad you mentioned the offline capabilities of this, because this is a function, I’m assuming, of it being a fixed coordinate system — much in the same way we can use any other machine coordinate system offline as well. But this would not be possible with traditional addressing, simply because we have to update it constantly.
The Network Effect
Daniel: If the internet has taught me anything, it’s that the network effect is the killer app — the more people use it, the more powerful the service or the good becomes. So what are you doing? How are you spreading this out, how are you creating those integrations, how are you making it so I can use this in other services and perhaps the devices that I’m using today?
Jack: Good question, and a very perceptive and accurate point, and it’s absolutely how we see our business. The network effect is something that we’re trying to stimulate, and one of the key ways we do that is by giving what3words context. It’s all very well saying, isn’t what3words an interesting system, but people need to understand how and where they can use it. So a lot of the time we spend is working with businesses who have location-based requirements — for example deliveries, or travel businesses where people are trying to find things. We’ve talked a bit about the car companies; they’re getting people from one place to another place, getting things from one place to another place.
Jack: So when you think about it like that: if what3words is integrated into taxi apps, as we are in various ones around the world — one good example is Careem in the Middle East, which is owned by Uber, it’s essentially the Uber of the Middle East — that becomes a context to use what3words. If you’re going to visit another city and the hotel you’re going to has its three word address on its contact page or within the booking confirmation, then you start using it that way and you start sharing that with people. Within our own apps and our own website we are increasingly working on encouraging people to understand the system, to find three word address locations, to save them and start sharing them with their friends or their contacts. So we’ve got all sorts of ways and ideas that we work on every day to try and stimulate this network effect.
Getting It Into GIS
Daniel: A lot of the listeners of this podcast will be somehow involved in the geospatial industry — perhaps they’ll be practitioners of geographic information systems. How can they use this? Are there any integrations that mean that I can just drag this onto my map and start using it today? And what would that use look like — will I get a grid, will there be labels all over the world?
Jack: Yes, absolutely there is. I’ll answer the question, but first let me tell you a very small funny early recollection from the business. When we first built what3words and we were trying to get people to use it, we had people saying, oh, do you have any integrations with Esri? And we said, what’s Esri? Because we didn’t come from this world at all — which seems inconceivable now, not to know what Esri is. And that person would say, they’re the biggest GIS company in the world. And we would say, what’s GIS? So we were complete outsiders thinking about this in a new way. But we learned very quickly the importance of the ability to integrate what3words and to have it functional within these different GIS systems.
Jack: So we’ve had a very good relationship with Esri from pretty soon after we discovered who they were and how important they were. And Jack Dangermond himself is something of a fan of what3words, which is very flattering and encouraging. We have a what3words locator that can be used in ArcGIS Desktop and Online, and what that allows you to do, on the one hand, is to search for three word addresses once you’ve implemented the locator. But it also means that you can drag on a CSV file of three word addresses, directly with additional information, onto your map, plot those points, see the labels of those points — the three word address and any other information you’ve included in your CSV — and then you apply the usual kind of GIS functions to use heat maps or whatever else it might be that you’re looking at. So we have an ArcGIS implementation, we have a QGIS implementation, and there are a few others which off the top of my head I can’t remember right now, but there’s a good range.
Jack: In a way it’s a funny one, because people from the GIS world are so used to dealing with latitude and longitude coordinates that it’s a different kind of step for them to get comfortable with three word addresses — to understand that part of their role as GIS professionals is to be able to communicate their findings to, I’m going to use this word cautiously, “normal people”, non-GIS people. And that’s where what3words can help them. Even if they’re totally comfortable as GIS professionals working with all sorts of coordinate systems, actually the benefit of what3words is to take that out of the GIS community and make it more usable for your everyday people.
Building a Language
Daniel: I’d like to shift gears again and look out into the future. We have this static coordinate system, and one of the beautiful things about it is that it won’t change over time, so we have this constant reference, which is really important and gives us a whole lot of advantages. But what does this mean for the future? Because when you have a coordinate system, there are very few coordinate systems that continue to develop over time, because they need to be that static reference point. What are you developing around the coordinate system that’s going to be exciting in the future?
Jack: That’s a great question. A lot of the work that we do in the company from a technical and product perspective is to make our particular coordinate system, the three word address system, as usable as possible. So we’ve talked about the voice work that we’re doing, and we do a lot of work to make it work across a huge range of different platforms — we obviously talked about the GIS plugins that we have.
Jack: We have an interesting development which is now available in some languages within our own mobile apps, which is optical character recognition. So instead of speaking to your device or typing the three word address into your device, you can press on the camera icon and it will read a page and find the three word address, and use our technology to make sure that you get a really accurate understanding for the device of what that three word address is. So that again brings what3words to life — if you’re seeing it in a Lonely Planet guide, for example, then you just scan it in and off you go.
Jack: Another big part of what3words being usable is the error detection and error correction system, which is something we can continue to evolve over time. What3words is slightly different from other coordinate systems in that nearby locations are different in terms of the words that they have to other adjacent locations. What that means is it’s very easy to detect errors, and we can use very interesting features like correcting for within a country or within a specific area, to make sure that you’re extremely unlikely to accidentally make a mistake. So the high level answer to your question is we’re really just looking at ways to make the technology more usable, more human friendly, make it available across a range of platforms — and, as we talked about earlier, just get it out there into the world, get people using it, stimulate this network effect by getting it into ever more useful contexts, whether it’s food delivery, package delivery, finding your hotel, or hopping in your car or your taxi.
Daniel: I really love the simplicity of what you’ve built here. I love the way it’s designed for humans right from the start — even in terms of the length of the address, the three words, the three meter squares. This is all very human relatable stuff, and I love the fact that it’s so usable in terms of voice, and now you’re building this optical character recognition. Again, very visual, very human.
Jack: Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say. If I’m being honest, a lot of these things we did think about in the beginning, and other things have been consequences of lucky design decisions early on that we’ve been able to make the most of. But I think understanding that what3words is for humans has driven really all our decisions from day one, even if we haven’t quite realized the full potential of those decisions until the fullness of time plays out.
Daniel: And it’s not just for humans — it’s for humans to talk to machines with, and to other humans. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you if there had been some sort of unfortunate collections of words out there. Have you had to go through the dataset and maybe spread words apart so they didn’t sound the same, or perhaps didn’t create any unfortunate misunderstandings?
Jack: There are a couple of points there. The language creation process is one that we take very seriously. It is extremely complicated — many orders of magnitude more complicated than you would imagine, even if you’re thinking about it very hard. There are certain things that we do for each language once we’ve understood the nuances of that particular language, and any intricacies that we need to understand about how the language is spoken and spelled and written down.
Jack: So we do work to remove, as best we possibly can, all words that sound the same as each other, to avoid confusion. In the English version you won’t find any address that is sale.there.here, because you don’t know how we’re spelling “sale”, how we’re spelling “there”, how you’re spelling “here” — and a machine wouldn’t know that either. We also put in a lot of effort to removing words that are offensive, including culturally sensitive words. So for example in our Arabic version we’re even more careful than we normally would be to deal with any alcohol related words.
Jack: Once we’ve done all of that and we’ve removed certain other categories of words, then what we find is that each word individually should be pretty much okay, and it’s a word that you’d be fine with having in your address. There will be reasons why a particular word may not shine particularly happily for a particular individual, but in general they’re all going to be fine. Of course you can find combinations that are strange or unusual, a bit rude. But in the real world you have very rude place names as addresses that have developed through history, some of which have been changed from the utterly depraved and filthy to more modernly acceptable terms, and people live with it. So it’s something that we are aware and conscious of, but we put in a huge amount of effort to try to mitigate that and minimize it to a negligible risk, we hope.
Daniel: It sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into it, and I guess that’s the advantage of building something once and not adding to it over time. You built this system and you had time to think about it at the start — what do we want it to look like, how do we want it to feel, what problems are we trying to solve with it, and what’s the best way of doing that?
Jack: That’s right. Our languages team in particular are phenomenal, and they work with huge numbers of native linguists to really understand the language and get the design considerations for a particular new language implementation right. And that applies across the business — a huge amount of thought goes into everything.
Daniel: Well Jack, I really want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and learning about this completely different way of addressing, and how it’s going to solve problems especially looking into the future in terms of autonomous vehicles. I could see having this coordinate system being a massive advantage for people and for machines. Before I let you go, where can we go to find out more about you or learn more about what3words?
Jack: There’s a huge amount of information on our website. You can have a play with the what3words map at what3words.com, you can watch some of our lovely videos that help tell the story and explain the use cases, and of course download the app which is available on iOS and Android. Have a play, get used to using it, and actually have it on your phone — you never know when you might need this.
Daniel: Thanks Jack, really appreciate it.