1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbots
Do you remember him? Chatman , super fast with MSN. A big campaign by KPN to make chatting via mobile popular. KPN wanted to show that mobile internet was always and everywhere accessible. To show how accessible Chatman was, KPN came up with one of the first chatbots known in the Netherlands during this campaign. This was easy to approach by adding him as a contact to MSN ( [email protected] ). Chatman had a minimal set of logic rules and also always answered differently. The answers were like wish cookies: random and generically applicable.
Artificial intelligence has now become mainstream and can be applied in everyday apps, including chat apps. Google is investing extremely hard in AI to enhance their services and products. Last russian phone number list year, Google already implemented AI in existing Google apps. For example, Google Photos now has the ability to search for cat photos, for example, without having to specify in advance which photo cats can be seen.
Google Assistant
This is all possible through artificial intelligence. In addition, Google has also released a chatbot called Google Assistant . Compare Google Assistant to Jarvis from Iron Man, a chatbot that answers all questions and also takes context into account. For example, are you talking to someone via WhatsApp about going to see the movie Iron Man tonight? If you ask Google Assistant: “What time is the movie?”, the chatbot will immediately know which movie you are talking about.
Siri, Alexa and Cortana are all examples of chatbots that have similar functionalities to Google Assistant. As many companies make the possibilities of chatbots available, the use of chatbots in 'smaller' apps is also expected to increase. For example, not every app is integrated with Siri or Google Now. I expect that integrations and the possibilities with such chatbots will only continue to grow in 2018.
2. Digital twins in the Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things (IoT) was born between 2008 and 2009 (pdf), a year after the App Store. As can be seen in the graph below, the interest in making all devices in the home smarter has increased every year since then.