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Reality Check: From mobile to ambient – how bots, AI, IoT, and language are reinventing computing

Is the future of mobile a world without a screen? POPin looks at the use of ambient computing to change the mobile space with bots, AI, IoT and language

At the recent I/O Developers Conference in Silicon Valley, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company had reached a pivotal inflection point: “It is truly the moment of mobile,” Pichai proclaimed. “There are over 3 billion people connected and they are using the internet in ways we have never seen. They live on their phone.”
For many listeners, Pichai’s comments came as no surprise because we have been living through this “moment of mobile” for some time now. Numerous companies have adopted a “mobile first” strategy, designing and building products for mobile devices as the primary experience rather than desktop or laptop computers. Shocking as it may seem, the term mobile first was coined almost a decade ago at Yahoo. Since then, mobile has completely changed the world, and today many leading internet companies, like Facebook, drive a majority of their usage and revenue from the mobile channel.
But mobile, or even mobile first, isn’t the end state. Rather, it is the beginning of an entirely new wave of innovation that will radically change how and where we interact with software, whether at home, at work or in the world around us. If we fast-forward another decade, the world will be radically different yet again.

Human language is the interface

One of the most remarkable aspects of this new world is that the interface – what used to be a computer or mobile screen – will be human language. We will just speak or text to the services we use and they will speak or text right back.
The early manifestation of this is bots. Bots are simple software programs that people can interact with via simple text-based question and answers, typically in a chat interface like Slack, or Facebook Messenger or Skype. To get the weather you don’t tap on a city, you just type in “what’s the weather?” To find out when a movie is playing, you don’t search for a movie and then scan through all the results, you just ask “what time is next showing of … ?” No links or buttons to click. You ask a question and the bot answers.
This isn’t science fiction, it’s happening now, and all the major players, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple have placed big bets on the technology in the last few months. To see it fully in action look no further than WeChat, the dominant messaging app in China, which has had a rich bot ecosystem for years. Connie Chan at Andreesen Horowitz has written a great primer on the WeChat phenomenon, and for a look at where venture capital believes this new craze is going, Sarah Guo at Greylock Venture Partners wrote a fantastic article on the “Conversational Economy.”

The bots will grow up

It is early days in this new wave; today’s bots are often rudimentary, even more painful to use than a simple mobile app. But the bots will get more sophisticated and be better able to interact via human language, and soon will start to feel like a true artificial intelligence, something that could beat the Turing Test and become indistinguishable from a human.
Current examples of this kind of advanced AI-like experience are Amazon.com’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now. These personal assistants learn user patterns and preferences over time to offer more calibrated choices that better meet the user’s needs and are quite flexible in their ability to react to human language. These will not only get more powerful, but the technology that enables them will start showing up in other bots and products quickly.
It is certainly for this exact reason that Microsoft just spent $26 billion to acquire LinkedIn. Delivering the kind of hyperpersonalized, human-like experience this new world will provide will require massive amounts of data: Microsoft has the technology and LinkedIn has the data.

From mobile to ambient

Although using human language as an interface and bots are exciting, the coming wave is much bigger. It also involves an ever-expanding “internet of things” in which billions of smart devices and sensors will be connected via networks to share huge volumes of data with AI control systems.
We’re moving toward an ambient computing world, one in which systems are always on, always available and always present, even without your mobile phone in your pocket. Users won’t need to take special actions to engage services, such as downloading a mobile app, sitting down at a clunky desktop computer to actually click a mouse and type in commands, or even unlocking their phone to find the right app. They’ll just interact with the world around them.
Imagine a world where you no longer even need your phone with you to ask about the weather, get directions, make a stock trade, update a customer record or schedule a dinner. You’ll just speak out loud and it will happen. Or imagine that you don’t need to schedule a video conference with your distributed team; you’ll just turn on the TV and everyone will be there. Imagine a world where you get home, order pizza for dinner, book the best flights for an upcoming trip, preset your house thermostat to turn off the air conditioning while you’re away, then call your parents so they can watch the children running around, all without touching a device or even a remote.
In some ways, the fast-changing world of ambient computing is already upon us. My young children have figured out how to set the timer for their time-outs when they misbehave – speaking their commands clearly into the air of our family room: “Alexa, set the timer for five minutes.” Then they knowingly take a chair in the corner with a sullen expression for the duration of the time-out. If my 6-year-old has already mastered this basic interaction with ambient computing, imagine how powerful and pervasive such a mobile interface will become in the years ahead.
If you’re running a website and thinking about making it mobile, mobile is already here. If you’re running something on mobile, it’s time to start asking how it would work if there wasn’t a screen, or how it might work without your phone.
What we want most from mobility is to make life simpler for consumers and businesses. With that goal in mind, it’s not too early for CIOs to start thinking about what types of future AI tools and interfaces they will need to enable their businesses to succeed.
Lee Ott, POP President
Popin President Lee Ott is a deeply experienced product leader. As the former partner director of product management at Skype, he was responsible for the vision and planning of Skype’s core assets including the video experience, messaging experience, content and advertising, and Skype for Android and Skype for iOS. Ott also headed up product marketing and product management for WebOS Software at Hewlett-Packard/Palm. In addition, he held several leadership positions at Yahoo. Ott is the co-holder of numerous technology patents in subject areas from communications to search. Directly prior to Skype, Ott was the founder and CEO of RokketLaunch, the developer of a communication and messaging platform that leveraged big data.
Editor’s Note: The RCR Wireless News Reality Check section is where C-level executives and advisory firms from across the mobile industry share unique insights and experiences.

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