"Address it to my wife, tell her I won't be coming home tonight". How much easier that message would have been if RB Greaves could have just spoken into his iPhone4 Siri app and then hit the send button. How much easier it is becoming today, for corporate types who missed out on the personal assistant because of budget cuts to work with a virtual assistant or "Clayton's secretary" by simply talking into a mobile device. From the imagination of Stanley Kubrick and the talking computer, HAL 9000, in 2001 A Space Odyssey to Siri and its iterations in your phone today, the virtual assistant has leapt from the cinema screen into our palms and our world will never be the same again.
What is happening today, sees the integration of web services and the understanding of everything on the web via conversations. Conversations that used to happen between bosses and their secretaries, conversations that used to happen between clients and their consultants and conversations that used to happen between anyone and a service provider of information. This process will build till everyone from the smallest child to aging grand parents will have their own VA's because it's important to have your schedules and reminders aligned with the Kindergarten yearbook and as we get older it becomes more important to know, who is that person we are playing bridge with in the retirement home?
What everyone is waiting for now, is technology to catch up with expectations as global companies like Amazon, European banks and travel companies start working on ways to engage us on a conversational level as they become part of our personal VA's. Sitting in an airport bar because another flight has been delayed, your VA let's you know that your choices include a day hotel, another flight on another airline, catching up with colleagues who may be in the same town or indulging in your favourite past time of falconry, of which there is a club nearby.
All of this can only happen if the VA is fully integrated and understanding of location, time, personalisation intuition and web content aggregation. Once all of this occurs within a conversational context the value proposition of a lot of providers will need to change in a hurry. Providers are already up in arms over the commoditisation of services via the web but once an intelligent string of two way conversations occur, the user landscape will change forever.
So how long before we see everyone having a conversation with their hand held device, a conversation with a robot, a conversation with a piece of software? A conversation where no human interaction is involved and a conversation that gives you replies and answers that will always be about you, with no emotional attachment from the other end.
A main concern in all of this, is the incessant chatter that will be heard everywhere as people ask inane questions about the most menial tasks to be taken care of by their VA's. A flock of seagulls, a murder of crows and all sorts of bird like analogies around the squawking that would drown out even the loudest elevator musak and drive us crazy. So the next step will be for software that reads lips, then when people talk, it should be in face to face conversations, not face to phone.
No comments:
Post a Comment