A year ago I posted “10 Trends to Watch: Conversational Commerce in 2014” to raise visibility of services, applications or simply user interfaces that combine natural language understanding, passive authentication and conversation management. My intent was simple: foster real-world implementations of highly-personal, natural user interfaces that serve multiple communications channels, modes and devices.

In the post, I made many references to “Conversational Commerce.” It was, in part, a tribute to the opening salvo of the “Cluetrain Manifesto” that “Markets are Conversations;” but more importantly it was a subliminal directive toward bringing a conversational model to self-service and assisted service. As individuals search for the goods and services that they eventually buy, the conversation starts when they enter terms in Google’s search box. It may then continue as a dialogue through a chat box on an enterprise Web site and culminate with a phone call to a sales-oriented contact center.

A survey that Opus Research conducted in Fall 2014 showed that, on average, these sorts of conversations span over 4 channels from initial search to purchase or, for post sale activity, from a simple look-up to resolution of a service issue. Because these ongoing commercial conversations take place over time and a multitude of channels, it has become clear that the persistent presence of an intelligent assistant is taking on great value. Whether they invoke a device-based resource, like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or the nameless entity that responds to “Okay Google,” or text/chat with a “virtual agent” on a company’s Web site, these intelligent assistants support a “natural user interface” that let’s them interact in their own words. Indeed Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Machine Learning (ML) are foundational to Intelligent Assistance (IA).

Dozens of firms have come to market with a different approaches to providing IA. Siri and Watson are the most visible, thanks to meg-investments by Apple and IBM, respectively. Concerted development efforts by Google, Nuance and Microsoft both validate the market and foster the soft of competitive fervor that insures constant refinement and improvement. Innovative implementations are fostered by development of offerings by smaller, entrepreneurial firms, including Next IT, CreativeVirtual, Intelliresponse (now part of [24]7), Interactions, inbenta, Kasisto, Artificial Solutions, and dozens of others.

Thanks to their combined efforts, IAs are prominent fixtures on e-commerce Web sites, not just answering FAQs but carrying out text-based conversations to ascertain a caller’s intent and respond or route requests accordingly. Add initiatives around device based “personal virtual assistants,” a list that includes Siri, Cortana, Nina and the unnamed entitity that responds to “OK Google,” and you can see how Intelligent Assistance is poised to become a mainstay of multichannel and omnichannel self-service and assisted service.

Last year, in my “Trends to Watch” post, I cited technologies and solutions that spanned mobile devices, contact centers, connected cars and home electronics. Each of these domains offers us (humans) with scores of opportunities to put Intelligent Assistants to use to help us harness the Internet of Things. In fact, the natural language interface that IAs support are destined to be the great equalizer and most common resource across smartphones, TV remotes, in care audio systems and form factors that have yet to be invented. Add a dash of biometric authentication, and the prospects for highly personalized intelligent assistance comes into focus. Voice, face, fingerprint are leading the way for simple, strong authentication. But product developers have shown that heartbeat, iris scans and other biometric factors can be just as effective.

In the coming year, enterprises will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in IA. If you add their existing investment in supporting technologies like data aggregation, knowledge management, and speech analytics, spending that is influenced by IA development will be in the billions. More importantly, they fundamentally change caller or Web surfers perception of “self-service.” Their core role is to “put the self back into self service.” By engaging in an ongoing conversation, personal virtual assistants are conditioning their humans to expect more and better results and outcomes from web commerce, mobile and customer care resources.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication

Tags: Contact Center, Siri, IBM Watson, Cortana, Intelligent Assistance, Natural user interface