My cognitive app experiences and favorite brand
My cognitive app experiences: Lyft, Quora, Yelp and Webtoon
Lyft, based on my real-time location, gives me the location of the Lyft drivers around me, the predictable pick-up wait time, the price and the evaluation. This enabled me to feel like I was interacting with Lyft service in real time. Also, based on my frequent routes and time zones, I was able to get promotions. This also seems to be an extension of the user experience, and I was able to feel that Lyft was providing personalized services to individuals.
Based on the posts I’ve read, Quora sends me a mail or announcement later on under the name Quora digest. This surprisingly sends me exactly what I’m interested in. This service analyzes logs based on what I searched for and recommends them well. Last Thursday, luckily, Quora’s engineers came to the CS building to talk and I got to know the technical background. They said that all clicks and query logs, such as the ‘more’ button and the ‘upvote’ button, are used in customized recommendation algorithms. I was quite excited and realized that there is a way to design a cognitive app like this.
Yelp is an app that I use often, whether I go on a trip or eat in the free time. And surprisingly I never failed when using the app. The Yelp app shows you the best rated restaurants on the map based on where you are or where you want to search. Depending on the options I want, it creates a new list of recommendation or review. It was very convenient because the photos, location, time, and price were designed in very user-interactive way.
Webtoon is one of the most famous apps in South Korea. Webtoon provides cartoon services optimized for the screen size of smartphones. Especially recently, a new kind of user-interactive cartoon, Smart webtoon, has come out. When I scroll with my finger, the screen changes or special effect comes out. In addition, a new kind of cartoon has come out in few months ago, using the state-of-the-art technologies to make the reader feel like interacting with the characters in the cartoon. They used Deep Learning (for this cartoon, Generative Adversarial Network) to create new characters based on user’s photos, or use Augmented Reality to summon characters of the cartoon to the space I am in. I was really surprised by this new form of comics, and it was a topic for many people.
My favorite brand: Naver
My favorite brand is Naver. Naver is the most famous IT brand in Korea. It offers various services such as Webtoon service I described above, messenger Line, mail, news, music, video, and etc. Recently, it has been expanding to various fields including shopping and so on, and I liked that it provides customized service to users. Especially, I think it is good to continuously communicate with developers and develop together.
