Conversing with Computers: What’s behind this major trend?
\n\nWilliam Meisel, Executive Director, AVIOS, and President, TMA Associates
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Dealing with computers through human language used to be science fiction. It’s not anymore. What is driving this trend? How far can it go?
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The general digital assistants
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The general digital assistants (GDAs) such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are leading the “talking to computers” trend. They are becoming available through more and more channels, from mobile phones and smartwatches to personal computers, home devices, and automobiles. The companies behind them are making huge investments to continually improve the quality of the speech understanding, the quality of the synthetic voices responding, and the ability to deal with a request properly.
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What’s the motivation behind this investment in the GDAs? First, the assistants address a problem for users with the classical visual interface driven by windows, icons, menus, and pointing devices. As the functionality of applications has continually increased, the graphical user interface has become overburdened. Too many apps, too many features in each app, too many devices. Sometimes finding specific information or a particular feature seems like solving a puzzle. This is compounded by the small screens on smartphones or smartwatches.
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A well-designed spoken interface using “natural” language provides a shortcut to what you want—specific information or a particular action or feature. Companies are trying to address this need for speed.
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And the visual interface is sometimes not practical when hands or eyes are otherwise occupied, e.g., in a car. Beyond that, the home devices like Amazon’s Echo have proven that a device without a screen at all is attractive to many individuals.
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But the companies behind the GDAs see an even broader trend. The proliferation of connected channels face users with a variety of user interfaces. One channel doesn’t necessarily know as much about you and your preferences as another. A general digital assistant can be a consistent interface to multiple channels. It can retain information and context as you switch devices, applications, or services. (You can even download Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana to an Apple iPhone.)
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The companies behind the general personal assistants recognize that they can become in effect the operating system of everything, the place you start to do anything because the natural language is intuitive and the GDA knows about you specifically. The GDA can be a layer unifying today’s operating systems. Whoever controls that portal to everything has immense power (and income). Expect heavy investment in the GDAs.
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The general digital assistants as portals to companies
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As the GDAs become increasingly popular and take over more of the functions of a web browser, companies realize they must be reachable through those channels. They are building “skills” or “actions” that can be addressed through those channels.
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Companies behind the GDAs are continually investing in making it easier to build effective skills by providing increasingly powerful development kits. Just as a company must have a web site today, it will be necessary to have a company digital assistant reachable through these channels.
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The good news is that the basic natural language understanding of customer “intents” is the same for any platform. Thus, the development of a company digital assistant for one channel makes developing one for another channel much easier. And many companies independent of the GDAs provide development toolkits, some with pre-developed templates for specific verticals or application areas.
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\n\nIndependent company digital assistants
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But companies need to be directly reachable, not just through the general personal assistants. If someone wants to deal directly with your company for customer service or to understand what you offer, a branded digital assistant easing that interaction is an eventual necessity to avoid digital overload and frustration. This is particularly the case as the general personal assistants teach them such frustration is unnecessary.
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Today, many companies are moving in this direction incrementally, with:
\n\nNatural-language automation at their call center. (“Please tell me why you are calling” versus “Press 1 for…”),
\n\tChatbots on their web sites offering text interaction, and/or
\n\tChatbots through messaging services such as Facebook messenger.
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In those cases, the automated interaction is typically backed up by agents. The objective is to save agents for more complicated interactions and let the automated assistants handle the easier requests. Over time, the automated systems typically learn to handle increasingly more complex requests as they accommodate information about how an agent handled a call. Today, most customers prefer self-service when possible rather than waiting on hold for an agent.
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There are other channels for company-specific digital assistants such as apps on mobile phones downloaded from app stores. Starting with a text chatbot is popular in part because it doesn’t require the speech recognition component and thus is easier to deploy and cheaper to support.
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There are also many supporting technologies that help create a company digital assistant. For example, analyzing call center calls can help understand what customers call about. Analyzing company documents using natural language analysis can help understand what answers a company can provide through a digital assistant.
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\n\nThe bottom line
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Conversational systems are the future of human-computer interaction. Like most trends, it is hard to predict how quickly they will develop. Will annoyance at poor early attempts initially discourage users and slow the process? Will the improvement in the general personal assistants encourage users to look for companies that can provide the same experience, and accelerate adoption? Will your competitor get your customers used to its friendly digital assistant before you have one to compete with?
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Beginning the process of understanding and being involved with this trend is the only prudent option.
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