The giants are stirring up activity in the realm of Intelligent Assistance. According to this account in Marketing Week by Alison Millington (registration required) Jon Alferness, VP of Product Management and AdMob Lead for Google, told attendees at the “Think With Google” event in London that digital personal shopping assistants residing on mobile phones will “help users through the fragmented customer journey.” From his perspective it is a natural evolution of the “digital advertising ecosystem.” Google is doing work at the intersection of personlization and machine- or artificial intelligence. Together they comprise a personal shopping assistant that would provide recommendations to individuals who are logged into the Google App based on personal history, location, indicated preferences and the like, much like Google Now serves up cards with suggested routes to work or events.

In Alferness’s view the personal shopping assistant will “understand you and what your needs are well enough… [to] give you the answers to the question before you even ask it.” That’s rapid recognition of intent if there ever was such a thing. Because Google is advertiser supported it is only natural for this to be framed as the evolution of “the digital advertising ecosystem.” Merchants, marketers and advertisers are the direct beneficiaries because Google can conduct cross-device measurement as part of its framework of “Estimated Total Conversions.” As Alferness exmplains “We’re now able to reprot back to marketers how much of their advertising spend actually drove customers into stores.

This type of attribution is the Holy Grail for advertisers. If it subsidizes better intelligent assistance over time, across multiple devices and in multiple locations, that could benefit all.

Meanwhile Matt Weinberger reports in Business Insider that Facebook is conducting trials of its own digital assistant, codenamed MoneyPenny. Rather than leveraging its mobile advertising infrastructure, Facebook is pursuing human-assisted self-service and shopping. Although the service may change before it is launched, it appears to be a cross between the sort of virtual assistant services offered by Magic or  Task Rabbit that engage live individuals to work out the logistics of carrying out your desired task and a recommendation engine that would enlist advice from subject matter experts (a la Native for travel or Vida for personal health). Thus Facebook is leveraging its biggest asset, a 700 million strong user base.

It’s also very interesting to note that Moneypenny is part of Facebook Messenger, meaning that it is part of the social network’s efforts to turn its texting app into a shopping tool. The silent communications phenomenon is organically taking off and has a life of its own.

(photo/art credit: C.J. Burton for TIME Magazine)

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Google, Facebook, Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Assistance, digital commerce