
2016 will be the year of conversational commerce - PVS-Studio
https://medium.com/@chrismessina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-conversational-commerce-1586e85e3991
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pesenti
We at Watson view this as our primary use case. Our #1 goal is to build a
platform (combining our existing cloud services that do intent identification,
dialog, speech, tone & emotion identification, etc) that allow other
businesses to build such conversational experience.

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bayonetz
Hi @presenti. Wondering if I might chat with you about Watson job
opportunities?

~~~
bayonetz
It's for...ahem...a friend.

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solipsism
_The net result is that you and I will be talking to brands and companies over
Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s
end, and will find it normal_

I guess there's enough evidence to say that this is a trend the tech industry
is moving toward. But is there any evidence for the assertion that we'll find
it normal?

I'm reminded of the numerous false starts of virtual reality. We're now in the
beginning of the virtual reality revolution... or.. we're in another false
start. I'm even more skeptical that "conversational commerce" is something
we'll want or like.

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lkrubner
Obviously, my own focus is on voice interfaces, and I agree with what's
written here, in so far as it goes, though it doesn't mention the existing
barriers.

As far as it goes, I think this is true:

"Before I begin, I want to clarify that conversational commerce (as I see it)
largely pertains to utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language
interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots
that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous
messaging context."

But it is very early days for voice interfaces, and there are numerous
problems that need to be overcome. What I wrote in "Amazon has no idea how to
run an app store" amounts to a list of problems that Amazon needs to address
before its Echo platform can take off. We've already discussed that on Hacker
News:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409)

But those issues are very specific to Echo. There are more general issues
which the article doesn't get into. Although the author does seem to sense the
potential:

"I mentioned this in my post last year, but we can now see that the voice-
controlled hardware trojan horses from the big companies haven’t necessarily
been embraced with open arms. Yet. I don’t have specific numbers, so I may be
wrong, but my sense is that it’s still very early days for devices like
Amazon’s Echo (which is being shrunk) or Google’s onHub."

In this next year, I expect 2 big trends:

1.) The threat of Amazon taking over this space is forcing other companies to
open up -- in particular, Apple is going to do a lot to open up Siri and make
it easier for developers to take advantage of the full power of Siri.

2.) developers will learn a lot about what this style of development actually
requires. I wrote about one of my first insights in "Dialogue designers
replace graphic designers when creating voice interfaces"
[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/script-designers-
repl...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/script-designers-replace-
graphic-designers-when-creating-voice-interfaces) but I suspect there will be
hundreds of similar blog posts, as more and more developers gain experience
and insights regarding the unique demands made by voice interfaces.

