The new show and tell in 2019

Source: FleishmanHillard.
Scott.

The way we interact with technology is changing fast as artificial intelligence (AI) enables us to communicate with our technology in new ways.

“Brands that use AI to engage in detailed and explanatory conversations – seeking to place AI in real-life contexts – will be next year’s big winners. Discussions on conversational AI increased 54% in Twitter topic volume from 2017 to 2018,” noted Sophie Scott, Global MD of FleishmanHillard’s Technology practice.

The predictions in the company's Tech Trends 2019: The Fads. The Fears. The Future, which analyses 1 billion tech-focused consumer conversations on Twitter between 2017 and 2018, along with insights from more than 25 technology thought leaders from around the world, include:

- Virtual, augmented and mixed realities will join to create new experiences for consumers and will creep even further into areas like retail, manufacturing and healthcare.

- Smart fabrics and exoskeletons will hit runways and warehouse aisles alike, challenging what the term ‘wearable’ really means.

Source: Ericsson. Dr Björn.

Dr Michael Björn, Head of Research Agenda at Ericsson Consumer & IndustryLab, and main author of the ConsumerLab trend report 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2019*, said: “Imagine a smartphone that not only knows what you do but also knows who you are. Today, AI can understand your personality just by looking into your eyes. It’s clear that technology adopters see a future where our devices know us better than we know them.”

Among the 10 hot consumer trends for 2019 that Ericsson has identified are several that have to do with how we will communicate with our devices:

Awareables

More than 60% of virtual assistant users think devices that understand our moods will be mainstream in three years.

Smart quarrels

Over 65% of virtual assistant users think smart speakers will argue like family members in three years.

Source: Ramco Systems.
Sivasubramanian.

Where AR/VR will shine

More than 50% of augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) users want apps, glasses and gloves that give virtual guidance for practical, everyday tasks such as cooking or carrying out repairs.

AR/VR was also highlighted by Ramesh Sivasubramanian, Head of the Innovation Lab at Ramco Systems. “Companies in labour-intensive industries such as aviation, the military and even cleaning firms are already offering experiential training via smart glasses or lenses... We expect more IT decision-makers to deploy AR-based training next year as it improves workplace safety, knowledge retention and user engagement,” he said.

Source: Dell EMC. Sim.

Andy Sim, Country Manager, Singapore Commercial, Dell EMC's take on the AR/VR trend is that it will now be “a presentation interface of the advanced capabilities of the modern data centre’s AI driven insight and expanding data pools”.

“The biggest enabling trend for AR/VR will not be the user interface, but the advances in data centre and cloud infrastructures to provide the data fuel, processing capacity and performance needed to make AR/VR a fully immersive experience,” he noted.

Gianfranco Lanci, COO, Lenovo, observed that there could be incompatibility between AR/VR content and hardware. “There will be a rise in demand for more hardware/software agnostic solutions to ease users’ pain points of experiencing incompatibility between AR headsets and glasses with AR content and platforms. Content creators and hardware makers may converge to develop a more holistic and seamless hardware plus software solution for businesses,” he predicted.

Tell me what you want

Source: Lenovo. Lanci.

In the enterprise space, Rob Newell, VP, Solutions Engineering, Asia-Pacific, Salesforce says that artificial-intelligence (AI)-enabled user interfaces and process automation will start to replace screen-based applications.

“Instead of having to navigate manually to a specific record or analytics dashboard, it will become possible to retrieve data using a straightforward spoken command. For example, a company employee could have AI fetch a regional business unit’s quarterly sales figures from the company’s annual revenue report,” he said.

Newell added that 2018 advances in natural language processing are allowing AI and conversational speech technology to do new things like learn the jargon and unique vocabularies of customers and extract from spoken queries the names of relevant people and companies, making them more feasible for enterprise use than ever before.

Source: Salesforce. Newell.

Such advances enable normal conversational speech to be used for customer engagement. Salesforce's Enstein Voice, launched in September 2018, shows how easily the technologies can be deployed across marketing, sales and services to enhance customer experiences, Newell said.

“We expect companies to start developing and launching their own customer service bots that their customers can interact with through their Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. These bots are supposed to continuously learn and improve over time to acquire a better understanding of what customers want; while being able to escalate a more complex issue to a human agent to continue the dialogue where it was left off,” Newell said.

Sivasubramaniam predicts that AI will see wider adoption at the enterprise level in 2019. “The world’s biggest Internet companies already offer virtual assistants, or chatbots, which can make conversation and automate administrative tasks using insights derived from past user interactions. At Ramco, we offer similar chatbots that can summon schedules, pay slips and even help raise claims.

“2019 will see more companies deploy such virtual assistants with natural language processing capabilities to automate busywork and push employees’ output to new heights. India and China are the ones to watch in this race, as they are two of the world’s top investors in AI research and development,” he said.

“Virtual assistants will continue to be pervasive in consumer-facing technology in 2019. We will see machine intelligence merge with VR/AR to create truly immersive experiences such as at home. Think of a virtual sous chef that can help you whip up a healthy meal for lunch or dinner. This will translate to your personal health as well, with intelligence wellness tracking devices that will provide more information about your body, such as heart rate variability, sleep patterns, and data you can share with health care providers for better care,” said Sim.

Source: Oracle Netsuite.
Naishtein.

Oracle NetSuite's take is that chatbots will not work in a vacuum, for an important reason. “Next year, more businesses will adopt AI-powered chatbots for frontline sales or customer service. These bots will do the heavy lifting – dealing with the most prevalent service requests in the first instance, or even starting the engagement from a marketing perspective. Yet, instead of replacing human interaction entirely, bots will work in tandem with customers, human agents and other bots to ensure the effortless flow of information and that customer satisfaction remains intact,” Ronen Naishtein, GM, Asia, HK & TW, Oracle NetSuite said.

Synopsys, on the other hand, cautions against being too optimistic about voice-activated software. “Many, many more business jobs will be staffed by bots in the year to come. If you think the average person is…average…wait until you find yourself yelling at a bot over the phone,” suggested Sammy Migues, Principal Scientist at Synopsys.

Source: Synopsys.
Migues.

Don't forget about security

And where there are new features for devices, there will be cyberattacks targeting those features. “In 2019, we can expect skill-squatting to become a legitimate threat. With more and more voice assistant-powered smart speakers entering the home, 'skills' – verbal commands that instruct the assistant to perform a task – are also becoming increasingly commonplace.

“Skill-squatting is a new threat where a skill is developed to look for certain statements and then redirect them before running the requested command. This could mean that a request to 'play some music in the kitchen' could be overtaken to first extract a user’s Wi-Fi information, home network and possibly password, before running the usual command so the user never knows their information has been stolen. With smart speakers ruling the home, we can expect to see them become bigger targets in 2019,” said Laurence Pitt, Global Security Strategy Director, Juniper Networks and Mounir Hahad, Head of Juniper Threat Labs, Juniper Networks.

Source: Juniper Networks.
Pitt.

Ericsson also discusses the idea of 'zero-touch consumption', highlighting that around half of virtual assistant users want automated bills and subscriptions, as well as self-restocking household supplies.

Dr Pernilla Jonsson, Head of Consumer & IndustryLab, Ericsson said: “We have already entered the age when humans and intelligent machines are interacting and working together. So far, we’ve only taken small steps into the future. Most of the zero-touch future is yet to be developed – and how we create that future is still in our hands.”

Explore:

Browse the full list of 2018 round-ups and 2019 predictions in TechTrade Asia

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about the LG CLOi SuitBot

*The insights in the report are based on Ericsson ConsumerLab’s global research activities over more than 23 years, and primarily draw on data from an online survey conducted during October 2018 of advanced internet users in 10 influential cities across the world.