By 2020, Morgan Stanley predicts 75 billion devices will be connected over the Internet of Things. In 2016, messaging platforms topped social networks in their share of human attention. And voice is rapidly becoming the preferred channel for human interaction with web-enabled devices. When interacting with the thousands of smart devices that lack graphic user interfaces, people naturally choose voice over keyboards, meaning we are witnessing the decline of the traditional web browser.
Many companies and developers are focused on the emergence of the voice-based internet, but standards are fragmented. Each smart speaker manufacturer, for example, must ask chatbot developers to learn its proprietary protocols and register chatbots company by company so that the chatbots can be browsed by end users. This fragmented approach wastes developer time and resources. Several major players such as Alexa are emerging to consolidate the market, but these players will formulate rules, centralize control, limit user experience, profit from the personal data they capture, and be unable to guarantee personal data security.
We propose a blockchain solution to underpin the voice-based internet, including a decentralized voice-based domain name system. Under this new system, chatbot developers will register voice domains on the blockchain, follow a set of simple instructions, and then their chatbots will be launched. In this way, any global user will be able to talk to any registered chatbot. Smart device manufacturers will no longer need to ask chatbot developers to register their chatbots. This solution preserves developer resources, while giving users a more convenient way to surf an open, voice-based internet. As traditional browser-based web sites evolve into chatbots, the traditional domain name system evolves into a decentralized voice domain system, and cryptocurrency becomes the global standard for chatbot payments.
In late 2017, George Zhao published a whitepaper initiating the blockchain voice-based internet together with five leading blockchain developers. An inventor known for his major breakthroughs in WeChat technology, George is an executive member of Blockchain at Berkeley, the CEO of the chatbot development platform YAYA AI, and a recent dropout from the Stanford Master’s Program in Artificial Intelligence. George’s team has rich developer experience in VoIP, Online Video, MMORPG, and P2P applications. The project team includes two Chicago-based YAYA AI developers, a linguist, and a cryptologist (Ph.D.) who designs standards for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The team also works in collaboration with BlockApps, Blockchain at Berkeley, DAG Labs, and Sharers Talks.
