Gartner: By 2019, 20% of smartphone interactions will be with virtual PAs
05 Jan 2017
Gartner: By 2019, 20% of smartphone interactions will be with virtual PAs
Advances in various technologies are driving users to interact with their smartphones in more intuitive ways, according to Gartner. Analysts there predict that by 2019, 20 percent of all user interactions with the smartphone will take place via virtual personal assistants (VPAs).
Gartner's annual mobile apps survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2016 among 3,021 consumers across three countries (US, UK and China) found that 42 percent of respondents in the US and 32 percent in the UK used VPAs on their smartphones in the last three months. More than 37 percent of respondents used a VPA at least one or more times a day.
Apple's Siri and Google Now are currently the most widely used VPAs on smartphones. Fifty-four percent of UK and US respondents used Siri in the last three months. Google Now is used by 41 percent of UK respondents and 48 percent of US respondents.
Gartner expects that, by 2019, VPAs will have changed the way users interact with devices and become universally accepted as part of everyday life. Today, VPAs are fulfilling simple tasks such as setting an alarm or retrieving information from the web, but in the near future these systems will be able to deliver more complex tasks such as completing a transaction based on past, present and predicted context.
This trend is also intensified by the acceleration of 'conversational commerce', but voice is not the only user interface(UI) for VPA use: Facebook Messenger is allowing users to interact with businesses to make purchases, chat with customer services and order Uber cars within the app. In addition, Tencent's WeChat generates over $1.1 billion in revenue by offering its 440 million users an all-in-one approach, letting them pay their bills, hail cabs and order products with a text.
With a predicted installed base of about 7 billion personal devices, 1.3 billion wearables and 5.7 billion other consumer Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints by 2020, the majority of devices will be designed to function with minimal or zero touch.
By 2020, Gartner predicts that zero-touch UIs will be available on 2 billion devices and IoT endpoints.
The shift to digital agents creates a number of challenges and opportunities for communications service providers. A TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst team, championed by Globe Telecom, is working together to tackle these. Amdocs, Huawei and Infosys are all participants.
The initiative is looking at creating a digital agent that understands natural human voices and combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and the latest customer relationship management (CRM) techniques to produce answers. Not only does this streamline how each query from a customer is handled, but the machine learning element means that the more queries it deals with, the greater its knowledge base. The team is also exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning can augment – rather than replace – the human workforce.
At TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore last month, the Catalyst was awarded the Best in Show prize.
Find out more in this article and the video below:
"The role of interactions will intensify through the growing popularity of VPAs among smartphone users and conversations made with smart machines," said Annette Zimmermann, Research Director at Gartner.
Gartner's annual mobile apps survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2016 among 3,021 consumers across three countries (US, UK and China) found that 42 percent of respondents in the US and 32 percent in the UK used VPAs on their smartphones in the last three months. More than 37 percent of respondents used a VPA at least one or more times a day.
Apple's Siri and Google Now are currently the most widely used VPAs on smartphones. Fifty-four percent of UK and US respondents used Siri in the last three months. Google Now is used by 41 percent of UK respondents and 48 percent of US respondents.
"VPAs' usage is bound to accelerate as they add many new features, including integration for business services, further language support and appear across more devices," said Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner.
Part of everyday life
Gartner expects that, by 2019, VPAs will have changed the way users interact with devices and become universally accepted as part of everyday life. Today, VPAs are fulfilling simple tasks such as setting an alarm or retrieving information from the web, but in the near future these systems will be able to deliver more complex tasks such as completing a transaction based on past, present and predicted context.
This trend is also intensified by the acceleration of 'conversational commerce', but voice is not the only user interface(UI) for VPA use: Facebook Messenger is allowing users to interact with businesses to make purchases, chat with customer services and order Uber cars within the app. In addition, Tencent's WeChat generates over $1.1 billion in revenue by offering its 440 million users an all-in-one approach, letting them pay their bills, hail cabs and order products with a text.
"We expect AI, machine learning and VPAs to be one of the major strategic battlegrounds from 2017 onwards, and make many mobile apps fade and become subservants of VPAs," said Ms. Zimmermann.
Voice and gesture
With a predicted installed base of about 7 billion personal devices, 1.3 billion wearables and 5.7 billion other consumer Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints by 2020, the majority of devices will be designed to function with minimal or zero touch.
By 2020, Gartner predicts that zero-touch UIs will be available on 2 billion devices and IoT endpoints.
"Interactions will move away from touchscreens and will increasingly make use of voice, ambient technology, biometrics, movement and gestures," said Ms. Zimmermann. "In this situation, apps using contextual information will become a crucial factor in user acceptance, as a voice-driven system's usability increases dramatically according to how much it knows about the user's surrounding environment. This is where device vendors' assets or partnerships in VPAs, natural language processing (NLP) and deep machine learning experts will matter."
Training a digital agent
The shift to digital agents creates a number of challenges and opportunities for communications service providers. A TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst team, championed by Globe Telecom, is working together to tackle these. Amdocs, Huawei and Infosys are all participants.
The team’s aim is to “explore the use of cognitive computing or artificial intelligence technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, to create the next generation of customer care services.”
The initiative is looking at creating a digital agent that understands natural human voices and combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and the latest customer relationship management (CRM) techniques to produce answers. Not only does this streamline how each query from a customer is handled, but the machine learning element means that the more queries it deals with, the greater its knowledge base. The team is also exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning can augment – rather than replace – the human workforce.
At TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore last month, the Catalyst was awarded the Best in Show prize.
TM Forum Deputy CEO, Nik Willetts, commented, “This winner showcased the business outcomes exceptionally well, and the inventive use of machine learning and AI. This Catalyst has the potential to reduce costs by between 10 and 40 percent, and Globe intends to implement it over the coming months.”
Find out more in this article and the video below:
