Business Insider has a nice article on how the Echo has become a huge success for Amazon. Its Alexa is the digital assistant in many a household as she helps them play music and with new extensions like Dot and Tap reorder items and do other handy stuff. Siri Eyes Free keeps me entertained and communicate safely when I drive – I use it to call and text people, listen to voice mail, provide sports and weather trivia. Others are addicted to Microsoft’s Cortana or Google Now.
Digital Assistants are a vital part of our daily lives.
Unit4 would like to also make them part of our business lives. At its Connect conference in Amsterdam this week it announced plans for its version. It’s goal: “Using pattern recognition to understand the behavior of the user, combined with data from a number of sources, the Digital Assistant performs useful activities by itself. “ It’s part of the evolution of the Self-Driving UX it announced last year, and growing relationship with Microsoft and leverage of its machine learning prowess (see my note – AI is the new UI).
I asked Unit4 for use cases they see and you can see a simple one in the mobile screen shot. They plan more complex ones around categorization of invoices according to risk profiles, pre-population of expense reports and time sheets based on historic data, and discount proposals based on customer risk profiles.
At this point, it is just a vision statement, but cannot wait to see the roll out. We are finding such creative uses for these assistants in our homes and cars, I cannot begin to imagine how many more scenarios business users will dream up.
