If You Hear Voices, Don’t Be Afraid, They Are Not In Your Head! Things Have Just Started To Talk!
Now that our home is our office, we can expect we will quiz smart pals less about trivia and more about our work.
Spring 2026: On the morning of any given day
You: Hey Mario, my connection is slow. Can you check the speed?
M.A.R.I.O.: Sure. I’m going to switch off and on your router…please hold…. the problem is solved.
You: Thanks. Can you please check if there is an email from Steve Red about a workshop?
M.A.R.I.O.: Yes, the meeting is postponed to Wednesday. Should I adjust your calendar around that? You have an appointment planned with Jamie Lee for 2025 tax submission.
You: No. Please leave it so, and send a note to Steve that I’ll be a bit late. Ask him if he can record the session.
M.A.R.I.O.: Done.
You: I’m checking invoice 4843/25 in the system, and the payment date does not match. Can you please check in the archive?
M.A.R.I.O.: Done. There is a 65% probability that month and day have been switched in the recording. I’ve sent a jpg of the invoice for your approval to fix the date.
You: Spot on. That’s the issue.
M.A.R.I.O: Opening a ticket for correction. I am recording and filing your confirmation.
You: Confirmed.
M.A.R.I.O.: The ticket is under processing. Solved in 25.2 seconds
You: Perfect. Can you please scan all open invoices for this month and check if there are other errors.
M.A.R.I.O.: Scanned 247 invoices belonging to 47 Purchase Orders. 3 invoices have a probability above 75% of a potential mismatch. I just sent the invoice jpg for your approval. Please click the approval button on each email, if you want me to correct the errors.
You: Only the first two are wrong. The third is fine. Done.
M.A.R.I.O.: Opening 2 tickets for correction. I am recording and filing your confirmation. The third invoice changed status to “verified”.
You: confirmed.
M.A.R.I.O.: Tickets solved in 22.1 seconds.
Thanks, Mario, done for the day, going for a walk.
M.A.R.I.O.: You are welcome, enjoy sir.
M.A.R.I.O. (Maintenance Automated Robotic Interactive Operator) is a personal assistant that will help you in your daily work.
Although he is a fictional character, odds are that cloud-based voice services will soon enter our work from home environment, simplifying the pain of logging into systems, filing tickets, checking documents, and other repetitive tasks.
If smartphones have created a new marketplace of apps that have revolutionized the way we communicate with people, the next wave of devices will change how we communicate with machines.
Less typing, more talking!
Today we can (almost) treat these smart speakers like a person. They can play songs we choose, they can set an alarm, roll curtains and water plants.
The fact is that we still have to teach them each specific skill as they are just a bit more than a talking, multifunction, remote control.
Soon Voice user interfaces (VUIs), such as Amazon Alexa, will learn by talking to us, accreting our digital interactions.
Smart pal’s skills are fast evolving and, now that our home is our office, we can expect we will quiz them less about trivia and more about work tasks.
Programming will stay in the background and, it will have to do with maintenance.
Among other benefits and applications that will elicit with time, we can expect them to help us in managing the enormous amount of data we generate daily.
So, what are the key three improvements chat pals will bring?
Empowering humans: machines are simply great in sorting, filing, calculating. So simplifying interaction with them will make us explore a solution in a way inconceivable a few years ago. The deal is simple: humans will define problems, and machines will solve them. Forget about brain implants: you will simply talk to things and get what you need. Simple as that.
Knowledge on hand: Ancient Greeks used to say: “Mega Biblìon, mega kakòn!” (big books, a big bad). In the Digital Era, this can be translated Big data, a big mess. While producing data has never been so simple, making sense of them remains a troubling exercise. Raise your hand if you know organizations that are using their data lake. Ok, more personal…raise your hands if you are on top of all your pics taken with your phone in the last 3 years.
The mess around your data applies to every aspect of our life. Chat pals will help sorting it out!
Realtime Staging: These technologies will help collect data differently, improving after each interaction. By asking questions to contextualize an event before becoming a memory, machines will specialize in structuring data. Some apps already propose albums of your pics, some create short videos from your shots, adding a name, music, and templates based on the content: the same approach will happen for all types of data, around your unique way of thinking, your taste, your background.
Conclusions
The future is bright closer than you think, with more free time and creative touch for all of us, as long as we put some light on the shadows.
Smart speakers will offer the perfect interface to query our digital shelves and to provide what we need in any situation. Three examples of what you will be able to do in the near future, by simply talking to a machine:
1 Finding a pic: just share any detail (a friend, a place, a moment, a t-shirt) and you get it directly on your TV.
2. Filing a claim: Just explain the accident and, You will get the insurance contract, with the specific reader highlighted, and a prefilled form.
3. Going to a new doctor: your chat pal will remind you about it, prepare and send an email containing X-ray, blood test, and prescriptions.
That’s only the start…
Thanks for reading. Tweet me @flavalib and let me know you read this!
If you liked this article, you might want to have a look at my other articles on Innovation
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