thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Intelligent Home Automation – Smart, isn’t it?

Intelligent Home Automation – Smart, isn’t it?

by | Sep 14, 2016 | Blog |

Amazon’s Alexa will now talk to GE’s connected appliances in a smart home push is the headline on techrepublic that got me thinking today. Home automation is definitely on the rise again. Wow, that’s cool, being able to manage my home without any remotes, which my kids tend to lose somewhere, anyways. Thinking of the kids: How about the ability to have an override on their TV usage … Home Automation is the Future Home automation or smart homes are on the list of hot topics for quite a while. The intelligent fridge that automatically orders food items that are about to run out is a decades old story. Its first mention was about 1998. Even my 12-year-old house here in NZ is fully wired and has some (not so, admittedly – but pretty expensive if you need to repair them) smart controllers which probably could control more than they effectively do. Technology like this is not only exciting but offers quite some potential to make our lives far simpler and to improve the experience of using the connected devices, well, with that of living in our homes. Still, many attempts at smart homes have been done over the years, most have failed or were not that successful. Comes the cloud and massive improvements in computing power. Comes the mobile phone and the tablet. Comes working voice recognition. Comes predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Well, AI is around since at least the mid 60s; Weizenbaum’s famous Eliza dates back to 1966. Alan Turing developed his famous test in 1950. AI was again a hip topic in the...
Putting the Cart in front of the Horse – Chatbots in Support

Putting the Cart in front of the Horse – Chatbots in Support

by | Aug 14, 2016 | Blog |

My recent rant on chatbots having the potential to kill user experience got some nice reactions. It brought me into some interesting discussions on support, mobile, the role, strengths and deficiencies of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and so forth. Most of these discussions dealt with mobile support but also with the question where AI could benefit most. Particularly good one were with Abinash Tripathy, CEO of mobile support platform Helpshift and Srikrishnan Ganesan, founder of Konotor, now hotline.io after being acquired by Freshdesk at the end of 2015. Both companies have a focus on in-app support, a solution category that basically got introduced by Helpshift, after Abinash identified a lack of good options or delivering support directly to and via mobile phones. One of the premises is that a lot of the technically necessary and relevant information can get collected directly and sent to the service back end transparently. They have some big customers, including Microsoft and a raft of gaming companies, including Zynga and Supercell. He, of course, has an opinion on bots in support, which he recently also expressed on Venturebeat. Hotline.io has a customer base that is mainly made of transactional companies, which, too, leads to a high message load but also leads to different approaches, as the user context is often about past transactions. This means that regularly not that much information gets sent together with the support request. Sri, too, has a vision on how to incorporate AIs and bots into support. Hotline.io is offering a browsing style of offering help using a shallow tree with icon-supported categories on top of...
Bots can kill Customer Experience

Bots can kill Customer Experience

by | May 23, 2016 | Blog |

Bots are all the rage currently. By the looks of it they are at the peak of the hype cycle. We will see their deep fall into the trough of disillusionment soon. After all the well-known examples based on the Facebook messenger are somewhat underwhelming, to formulate it carefully. There is not much artificial intelligence visible – nor needed – to provide services like these. They also come with a poor user interface. And this combination of hyped examples, mixing up chatbots and AI, has the potential to kill customer experience. They certainly kill the user experience. Unless, this is, that these machines already reached a level of intelligence that they are magic to my simple mind… Which I doubt. To be sure, there are AIs around that amaze us: IBM’s Watson, Apples Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Now, …   even Microsoft’s infamous Tay which got a pretty bad reputation in no time, to name but a few. Recently a whole class of graduate students didn’t realize that their teaching assistant Jill Watson, an AI based upon IBMs Watson, was actually an AI and not a person. And I sincerely believe that in not so far future we will see AI in many places that is indistinguishable from a human. As Salesforce’s Marc Benioff recently said we will have AI do things that we cannot even imagine right now. The potential is virtually endless (pun intended). But what we see right now being built standalone or embedded into messaging apps has nothing to do with AI and it often has a poor user interface. This needs to get fixed, or...