Can two chatbots fall in love this Valentines Day 2019? - Issue #41

Can chatbots fall in love? Should they? And if so, how do you define love between chatbots? There is an ongoing exhibition on display on Singapore that will run until two chatbots fall in love. I bet a few Valentines ago this was not the news you were foreseeing to read when opening a tech newsletter. Yet, here we are. I expect we will have streaming of chatbots (or bots) alone, no human intervention. With that being said: Happy Valentines Day! Whether you believe in it or celebrate it or not, I just want to send love from my heart to yours. All of our activities are made better by the love we put into them. And our lives are enriched by those we love and love us. This day, keep in mind I love and appreciate all of you ❤️. Also, please keep reading, there’s a thing called Refrigerdating that you can not miss!

I’m extremely excited to announce that I will be speaking at the SuperBot conference in San Francisco next Tuesday April 2nd. You can use code “mari” to register and get 25% off price here. See you there, it’s expected to be an amazing conference. Also look at the art they made: a superhero cartoon with my face, this one is a keeper!

Two refrigerators news from Samsung this week: Samsung launches new smart washer and dryer equipped with Bixby that can recommend the best wash and drying cycles for your load, taking into account its size, colors, and amount of dirt. You can use Bixby to start and stop the cycles, and can also schedule for a preferred time. This by itself is not extremely surprising, we knew at some point our devices will all talk to us, but then I also learned about Refrigerdating (this is not a joke!) a service by Samsung that helps you to find love based on the content of your fridge. By uploading an image of your food, you can get in contact with others who have realized that you are what you eat! I mean, I can’t stop talking about this, I only regret they haven’t market it more aggressively. The service is to promote FamilyHub, Samsung’s refrigerators technology, but you can sign up and participate. I was too afraid to upload a pic of my fridge to sign up, but do let me know if you sign up and end up dating someone because of the inside … of their fridges.

Forbes’ 7+ Amazing Examples Of Online Chatbots And Virtual Digital Assistants In Practice had amazing and interesting uses of chatbots, but the above example was the most impactful, showing a use case for the technology that it’s far ahead from the typically customer oriented role chatbots are portrayed in.

Amazon keeps opening their Alexa skills platform for users in new and more convenient ways. In their latest announcement yesterday the company is opening their Blueprint offering to the skill store:

Please note the no coding required highlight. There is a lot to unfold in the announcement for content creators, but the main point is the democratization of the Alexa skills creation process. The Seattle company is making easier for creators with no coding abilities to add to the list of skills. And that is without doubt a wonderful opportunity for both Amazon and the creators: spreading the platform for the former and easiness of integration of their current content into voice for the later. However, there two issues that I keep pondering, the first one is the Achilles’ heel of voice tech so far: discovery. Even though this is clearly a step forward, as more users build skills, it will help with awareness and use, there is still work to do in getting users in front of skills. And the second issue is about this process of making it easy to everyone: In voice, the technology is not the imperative, but the design, the design of the conversations. For voice, the conversation is not content is the application. The conversation is the structure of the application. And thus, designing the conversations is where the real challenge lies for engaging voice first experiences.

Juniper Research forecasted this week the use of voice assistants is set to triple over the next few years. The firm estimates there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from the 2.5 billion assistants in use at the end of 2018. The interesting part is that Juniper predicts the fastest-growing category for voice over the next several years will not be smart speakers. It will be smart TVs. The report also talks about voice commerce: We expect the majority of voice commerce to be digital purchases, until digital assistants offer truly seamless cross-platform experiences.

Finally, the report highlights smart speakers becoming integral part of user’s routines and the decrease of standalone mobile apps: There are early indications that smart speakers are becoming a part of users’ daily routines in ways that voice assistants on other platforms are not. This will lead to increased demand for voice-only interactions in the future.