Apple revolutionised touch base interaction with smart devices when the first iPhone was launched. This paved the way for a new way of how we used our mobile devices and have since become the preferred choice for all smartphones in the planet to function on. With machines learning and heavy investment in artificial intelligence, that’s about to change.
Gartner, predicts that by 2019 a new form will take place in the way humans enable devices, with Virtual Personal Assistant, like your Siri, Google Now, Cortana and Alexa, 20 percent of all user interactions with the smartphone will take place by you talking naturally to your phone to do tasks.
“The role of interactions will intensify through the growing popularity of VPAs among smartphone users and conversations made with smart machines,” said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner’s annual mobile apps survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2016 among 3,021 consumers across three countries (U.S., U.K. and China) found that 42 percent of respondents in the U.S. and 32 percent in the U.K. used VPAs on their smartphones in the last three months. More than 37 percent of respondents (average across U.S. and U.K.) used a VPA at least one or more times a day.
Apple’s Siri and Google Now are currently the most widely used on smartphones. And this will bound to increase as they add many new features, including integration for business services, further language support and appear across more devices.
While the current versions fullfill simple tasks such as setting the alarm or retrieving information from the web, but in the near future these systems will be able to deliver more complex tasks such as completing a transaction based on past, present and predicted context.
In fact, Facebook Messenger is allowing users to interact with businesses to make purchases, chat with customer services and order Uber cars within the app. Moreover, Tencent’s WeChat generates over $1.1 billion in revenue by offering its 440 million users an all-in-one approach, letting them pay their bills, hail cabs and order products with a text. Facebook is beta testing their own AI with Morgan Freeman voicing the app for managing tasks for the smarthome.
By 2020, Gartner predicts that zero-touch UIs will be available on 2 billion devices and IoT endpoints. “Interactions will move away from touchscreens and will increasingly make use of voice, ambient technology, biometrics, movement and gestures.
