Dive Brief:
- Businesses are beginning to investigate how to incorporate conversational user interfaces (UIs) into the enterprise to better serve their customers, according to a new report from ThoughtWorks.
- As conversational UIs improve and natural language processing becomes more accurate, businesses are exploring how they could impact business strategy. As a result, ThoughtWorks predicts Alexa, Siri and Cortana and others smart devices could soon be heading into the enterprise to handle a multitude of simple tasks and allow workers to focus on bigger picture needs.
- But part of the progression of conversational UIs stems from their potential to have increased capabilities. ThoughtWorks predicts conversational UIs will soon be capable of a wider range of interactions that will integrate gestures, facial expression and touch.
Dive Insight:
Automation is coming fast, and ThoughtWorks says enterprises are beginning to get much more serious about how and where they can implement conversational UIs to improve their businesses.
If UIs can succeed in incorporating gestures, facial expressions and touch, they could give businesses new ways to interact with their customers and add new value through "Intelligence as a Service," according to Mike Mason of ThoughtWorks. Once organizations see new avenues for device usage, adoption will likely increase.
Service providers are already making strides in bringing virtual communication devices into the enterprise. Amazon Web Services recently announced Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact center service for the enterprise. The service uses Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa to respond to questions over the phone or via text, its Lex chatbot building service and its text-to-speech program Polly.
