Hey Siri, Can you book me a cab? Hey Cortana can you book my appointment with the Dentist for this weekend?

Seems some kind of marketing campaign but it could be reality very soon and when it materializes it will have an impact on everyone involved in the business of “Information” in the new economy. So Lets dive!

The Current Scenario

So today, for everything we deal with some kind of application living in our smart phones. From ordering groceries to booking a cab or getting an appointment with a doctor. These paid or free applications help us right from our morning to till the time we sleeep. Right now we just do a chit chat with Siri or Cortana or expect some task reminders from Google Now.

IBM predicts that “Cognitive Computing” will be the front line of computing in the next few years. Cortana has been fundamentally designed and crafted to live across platforms and already its available on Windows, iOS and Android. Technology blogs and AI evangelists are already visualizing the Post-App world.

Post App Era :- The “Digital Assistants”

The post app era has started crawling into our lives. All the tech titans are on-boarding the Digital Assistant bandwagon in various form factors. Amazon with its “Echo” device has a different lens. Most of the communications will happen via these “Digital Assistants”. They will do everything for us right from the meeting reminders to ordering groceries to booking cabs. When Apple opened iOS for developers, we experienced the way in which we our lives and I must say the next one is due. The world were Siri will stay in your phone, watch, even your vehicle. You just narrate something and she will do it for you. That’s what seems the promise now, if not anything less.

What will happen to the present apps??

The applications on our smart-phones have to evolve and embrace the compatibility with these digital assistants. They have to leave the comfort zone of our devices, get an address on the cloud and scale up to serve a million more requests. Lets not complicate and start visualizing a simple use case

Lets say I have to book a cab. Right now I tap the Uber app , it gets my location and send me the details about the chauffeur. This will change. I would say to my digital assistant to book me a cab. It will be communicating with Uber on the cloud to get me my car and Uber service on the cloud will be accepting requests from Digital Assistants across the Globe and Time-zones and serving them.

Hold on, this is not all. Once your digital assistants learns about your daily timings and locations it will automate the process and you won’t be worrying about it. Imagine ordering groceries and food and everything which you do with you apps now ? Take a minute and visualize.

“The Catch Phrases”

So what we visualized just now involves some very sophisticated technologies put to work. Machine Learning, Neural Networks, High Performance Cloud Content Delivery Networks, Big Data and Analytics, Speech Recognition Technologies , Machine Learning algorithm will be harnessed to learn about your daily habits, High performance clouds will ensure services uptime and Big Data analytics will be help in realizing business values to keep the bottom lines and balance sheets healthy for all stakeholders.

The Challenges

Certainly when we look into the fine grain details about this, it seems an uphill task. The very first challenge is to standardize the process. We need some agreed standards for all service providers to take off on the same pitch. Data interchange formats have to be innovated to so that they can be innovated so data can be fed to analytic engines and machine learning algorithms and also it should reach the farthest consumer who is not on a high speed network.

Seems that Google already has realized this. Going open source with Tensor Flow will help others and in return bring back value for Google. Microsoft is also at the fore-front and has some big plans for Cortana tight knit with Bing and Azure. Amazon is trying out something different with Amazon Echo. The service providers have to openly embrace these digital assistants like Uber, Zomato, Practo , AirBnb and others.

“Data would become an asset and liability at the same time “

The tech titans will know everything about us, Even how many times we hit the snooze button on a Sunday morning. This vital information could be monetized as I already said to serve high precision offerings of all kinds to the consumer. Not to mention this critical data should be protected from all kinds of intruders as access to such kind of information can lead to a complete chaos .It could make some one experience near death as we become highly dependent on this services.

So just hold, and wait for the post-app world. The digital assistants are here to help us get much productive and provide the next billion dollar opportunity for Digital Enterprises.

Thanks for reading!

-NP