I have been a strong advocate of conversational technology (VoiceTech/NLP) and AI and have pitched for it in various conferences, Guest Lectures at leading business institutes and to corporates and I am often being asked what will happen to our jobs? So, this is true that Artificial intelligence seems like a big untamable monster to most, and everyone is little anxious about future.
And that could be true sitting in 2010, but past few years new old research and young progressive companies and devision of enterprises are willing to make it their sole purpose that the infuse digital transformation in their company and provide assistance to others. But, with the prevailing reputation that comes at a cost of educating everyone, really everyone.
They see it as a risk and any have burnt their hands trying to tame novice early stage AI models. But thats fine, thats how we grow. I believe that we are intellectual beings with curious minds, why would we want to do repeatable jobs which machines can do with greater efficiency. We can delegate these chores and teach the machines to help us better and imitate human decision making, innovate at personal level and “Democratise Artificial Intelligence”.
Democratising AI through platforms for like voice technology – Natural Language processing so the technical algorithms can stay with specific user base while use of the AI algorithms can be made as simple as conversing with machines. Thats a sure shot way to upskilling resources for example: Team of Analysts can train dashboards and Business Intelligence tools to map business KPIs and generate Compelling Business Stories and Insights in natural language for everyone in the organisation to benefit from, and then keep building the training over it through machine learning. We are personally running trials with Fortune 50 companies on this, so when I say you need to start looking at ways to incorporate new technologies, I mean it.
For enterprises there are certain imminent crisis that demand that they change rapidly and market is not at all as forgiving as it was a few decades back, someone is constantly rooting for you to make a mistake. This is leading enterprise to transform under the integrated environment of Digital Transformation.
Voice Technology has lately become a stable AI process and would completely change the way we interact with technology in the future. Visualization will remain at the heart of it however with conversational technology, we can expect a shift to more verbal ads, like radio, but more personalized and actionable, but still to make a decision on which product to buy you would want to see it visually. Also search will become more specific and hyperlocal, where we will be prompted to give verbal feedbacks, that would amount to popularity of products and places, how it happens with mobile applications today.
Siri, Cortana, Alexa have brought conversation technology to people for some time now. They come bundled up with smart phones and can be used to do basic searches, to look up certain things, cue up songs etc. Speech technology has come much further than that. With its advancement we can now control our oven, tv and other house hold devices, can search complex data from cloud or can make phone calls for ourselves. It can change the way we function in our daily lives, our time with our family, services we receive and the jobs we do. It can eliminate learning curve of devices, repeatable chores, and compiling excel sheets. And it will not happen eventually, it is happening now.
Developers will innovate to create more audio centric user interface, there will be discovery period for them to find out how to minimally prompt user to give inputs and implement voice modulated visual commands. We can see speech approaching a point where it would become so reliable that we can just use it, like how we do it with other humans, and not even think about it.
I am personally inspired to bring acceptance for conversational technology globally and I believe that the real success for this would not be when big corporations and industries would be using it but when every small and medium business and every household would be using it and help us to get a hold of our receding grip on reality from visually attractive and distracting screens on our tv, on out laptops and our smart phones.
We have seen this kind of a shift with automated technologies and processes which has led to reduced laborious work, efficiency increased and averted accidents. Smart phones brought technologies closer to the end user. So, I took side with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies, that will aid seamlessly while co-existing in our realities. And impact is not just on us in our personal capacity but for businesses too and professionals who spend endless nights collating data and make pretty ppts to show to the bosses. I believe that spreading the word on changing technological demography is not our responsibility or our burden. But you know why I make it my purpose?
Because it is a major step in evolution of technology and I know we need to harness it, shape it now, before someone else does it for you.
About the Author
Preksha Kaparwan is the Co-founder, CMO, V.UX Designer of Realbox.AI . The versatile IHM Pusa graduate initially served as the chef but got inclined towards technology and business analytics and founded RealBox in 2015. Within three years of its inception, they have raised $300k for Realbox and, their customers include fortune 50 and big 4 enterprises. As a thought leader she has been part of TEDTalk talk shows. She was awarded ‘The sparks 2018’ by your story for tech services for her exceptional contribution as a Tech Evangelist.
