If you are not deaf to the things that are taking place in the tech world and all the ways new technologies are transforming our surroundings, you must have heard already about Artificial Intelligence (AI). This new facet of machine led intelligence is lately pushing growth for many businesses. Several leading tech brands are already in the research and development of AI enabled products including Google’s self-driving car project to already unveiled Amazon‘s Alexa, the voice command enabled home theater system.
When talking of artificial intelligence we can call to mind all the personal assistant applications that are making our user experience with handheld devices easier and richer. Thanks to digital assistants completing any task with simple voice commands became easier than ever before. Many apps besides offering speech control are allowing further control and the better autonomous ability of the apps to function as per user preference without much human intervention. So, in all respects, AI is continuing to push our need personalisation in app development.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Let us start with the very question first. Already the term Artificial Intelligence is used in many contexts. What exactly does it mean? Essentially, when a machine or computing app can solve certain problems that are normally done by human intelligence, this new machine-ability is called artificial intelligence.
In reality, AI is basically a term that encompasses several fields of machine intelligence including machine learning, processing of natural language to machine language, the visual learning capability of machines and managing information to provide deep lying insights. When it is referred in the context of mobile apps AI is used as the embedded algorithm to chatbots or contextually active sensors.
Smart Speech Recognition
Smart speech recognition is where the evolution of artificial intelligence mostly began in the case of a mobile app. But if the app just understands the speech to some extent and cannot decipher all words spoken by the user in connection with the app, integrating speech recognition is still not flawless. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) which literally can transcribe voice to text comes with many platforms including Android and Windows but not by iOS. For other platforms, speech recognition can be incorporated through api.ai, wit.ai, and Nuance.
But with the incorporation of speech recognition, only half of the work is done. The very next and most important step is to integrate Natural Language Understanding (NLU). This where so-called speech recognition becomes smart with AI playing an important role. By providing all the different examples of user requests in natural language the developers basically train the system to understand a variety of user requests in natural language and way of speaking.
Understanding The Users Intent
Only understanding the natural language of user requests still leave a lot of room for the respective app not to understand what the users actually want to say. The typical pronunciation and difference of voice and accent further complicate the understanding. To understand the user’s intention in different contexts can help breaching this gap of understanding. By understanding the user intent an app can further target the audience and allow better engagement.
Offering Personal Experience is Crucial
If you look at the digital marketing trends across the niches for some time, you must be realizing that every brand is targeting their customers and users with personalized contents along with design elements and sometimes features that can boost the personal experience of the contents. So, app developers are also increasingly focused on making the personal experience better. Now, thanks to AI developers can allow more personalization with apps.
With AI capabilities built in and the integration of device sensors that offer deeper feedbacks about user location and behavior, mobile apps can offer more scopes of personalized contents and functions. This obviously ends up in boosting the user engagement and retention rate.
The Future of AI in the Coming Years
As for describing the state of things with artificial intelligence in the present development world, we must say that more and more companies are actively working with AI and incorporating it into the apps. Artificial intelligence from its first generation applications has progressed to become more matured and robust. At present we want the chatbots to answer more quickly and answer a broader range of user queries than ever before.
If you look at the capability of personal assistants in understanding the user voices, still most of these assistants have a long way to go. An understanding wide variety of accents and voices in speech recognition remained a big challenge that most chatbots and digital assistants have to win over.
Expectations Run High
As our expectations from automated digital maneuvers are continuing to increase in future we can expect the enhanced capabilities of chatbots to replace the so called customer care executives in call centers completely. Yes, in the time to come chatbots can be available to answer all the queries of customers in call centers.
Similarly, digital assistants instead of just remaining available to perform certain actions as and when we command them can play more proactive role in initiating actions to control home gadgets, workplace devices, crucial actions like replying calls, answering emails, sending alerts, etc. We can expect artificial intelligence to take more meaningful and intuitive role across various applications.
The biggest promise for artificial intelligence in mobile apps is the enhanced role of analytics based on the diversified data. AI coupled up with data analytics can further aggravate the opportunities for more mobile apps to be more contextual and user specific in a variety of ways. In respect of personalisation, it is more about knowing your users in more details. User analytics can deliver deeper insights about users for the machines process them for proactive actions satisfying user requirements in different contexts.
To Conclude
We must admit the huge promise of artificial intelligence in respect of mobile apps of the future. Though there are several shortcomings that need to be addressed, the promise and unprecedented interest from mobile app developers seem to propel the momentum of AI in app development.
