Just before lockdown started, I, along with my family, was on a long drive. That route was new for me and I was continuously asking my wife to search for some landmark on Google Maps, And for obvious reasons, She was irritated with these frequent instructions. Grasping the situation, my 8 years old took mobile in his hand and he started giving voice instructions to Google Maps. As parents, we were surprised that kid thought of this mode of input whereas my wife was using conventional method of typing. It is not that she did not know of voice input option, however never bothered to switch. So technology is available and younger ones are using it with ease, while we, been there done that category, are not able to switch.

There are clear indications that Conversation AI will become most popular UI (User interface) for human to interact with machine. In addition, Voice will become key interfacing channel for such UI. Conversation AI will be most transformational User Interface for human interaction with Machine. You can see Voice enabled remote is becoming de-facto standard to operate television. Alexa @ home is being used to play songs or to get some basic info from google using voice-based search.

If we talk about main transitions “Mainframe ->Client->Server->Web->Mobile”, All the UI changes in past were just changing look, feel and size of interface. Despite each of these technologies being transformational from IT perspective, it did not make any significant changes in the way human interacts with machine. In all these, Machine dictated how and in what sequence human should interact with machine using Menu/Navigation/Button/UI Control etc. But Now we are having a technology in form of Conversation AI, User will decide what he/she wants machine to do and in what sequence. It would be like human-to-human interaction. This is going to be a game changer. You need not to be computer literate; you need not to know how to browse etc. Would not this be a great liberation, Information to everyone will be reality.

Are enterprises up for this change in same way?

As usual, Enterprise adaptation of technology is always slower than consumer adaptation. Most of the enterprises today have some conversation technology and have some use cases implemented using voice as input mode. However, most of them do not perceive the macro phenomena of transformation around Human-Machine interaction. These enterprises have Chabot on their corporate website, but hardly anyone uses. There are reasons for low usage; it can be due to wrong selection of intents, sub-optimal dialogue design, no/broken transition to alternate channel etc. Today this technology is used mostly for query-response and service request processing only, nevertheless enterprise need to see this as a new Channel and have strategy to use this channel for Promotion, Commerce and Servicing.

From consumer perspective, Conversation AI is one of the most transformational technology within AI family. Enterprise will have to make ongoing investment in this space to be ready for the day, when most of users would like to interact with this channel only. 

Accordingly, Enterprise applications’ design/development will also need to be cognizant of this upcoming change; else, their investment on costly UX will not yield expected benefit. Such UI may become irrelevant. It goes without saying, Legacy systems will have far more challenges. 

If you are planning to start a new Customer experience program, new application/UI development for legacy application, always ask one question – Is it contemplating Conversation AI based interface?