Tag: Alexa
From Netflix recommendations to the rise of voice assistants, AI is increasingly finding its way into our daily lives. Just yesterday, Nike announced that they are buying an AI startup to predict what consumers want. You can’t deny AI is everywhere.
How do we accept, understand and trust AI in our day to day lives? Look no further than our very own Retail Revolution research study, which this week was featured in Business Insider series How AI Is Changing Everything.
The Tik Tok takeover continues! By partnering with Giphy, fans of both can now import stickers and create memes.
Are third party schedulers a thing of the past? Instagram rolls out their very own post creator studio.
Alexa, close your ears… Amazon are now giving users the option to opt out of human review of their voice recordings.
Social media marketers rejoice as Snapchat’s new tool makes it easier to create vertical video assets.
Pin, pin, pin. Shop, shop, shop! The number of retail products on Pinterest was up by 50% in Q2 of 2019.
This report of high-subscriber YouTube channels finds that children’s content received more views than other videos!
The 4 giants unite in their goal to simplify data migration between platforms, as Apple joins Google, Facebook and Twitter in The Data Transfer Project.
Introducing WhatsApp Pay! Messenger services plans to make sending money between their 400 million active users as easy as sending a voice note.
From Netflix recommendations to the rise of voice assistants, AI is increasingly finding its way into our daily lives. Just yesterday, Nike announced that they are buying an AI startup to predict what consumers want. You can’t deny AI is everywhere.
How do we accept, understand and trust AI in our day to day lives? Look no further than our very own Retail Revolution research study, which this week was featured in Business Insider series How AI Is Changing Everything.
The Tik Tok takeover continues! By partnering with Giphy, fans of both can now import stickers and create memes.
Are third party schedulers a thing of the past? Instagram rolls out their very own post creator studio.
Alexa, close your ears… Amazon are now giving users the option to opt out of human review of their voice recordings.
Social media marketers rejoice as Snapchat’s new tool makes it easier to create vertical video assets.
Pin, pin, pin. Shop, shop, shop! The number of retail products on Pinterest was up by 50% in Q2 of 2019.
This report of high-subscriber YouTube channels finds that children’s content received more views than other videos!
The 4 giants unite in their goal to simplify data migration between platforms, as Apple joins Google, Facebook and Twitter in The Data Transfer Project.
Introducing WhatsApp Pay! Messenger services plans to make sending money between their 400 million active users as easy as sending a voice note.
Voice search is on the rise with more and more brands adapting their marketing strategies to incorporate voice functionality across Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home and more.
With voice devices and services such as Google Home and Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri skyrocketing in use across 2018, consumers are increasingly comfortable with voice-driven, two-way dialogue with brands at unplanned times, often away from a mobile or computer; It’s a different kind of brand engagement, with a starting point that is usually a question (think ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’) and responses more instantaneous and organic than ever. ComScore predicts that, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
Voice search changes the nature of search, increasing the importance of questions and simplicity of responses. This, in turn, increases the need to ensure your brand is front of mind when the question is asked, and positioned as the top informer. It’s a creatively challenging format with potential for big results, especially for brands naturally attuned to answering the most-asked questions.
For example, many breakfast food brands are keen to position themselves as breakfast-time problem solvers. Should they not be vying to answer a likely voice-driven query of ‘How can I make breakfast more exciting?’
Ignoring the nascent new way of searching is a dangerous thing to do. Now is the time for brands to invest time and money into their voice search offering. This will involve many test and learn situations, a new breed of SEO specialist and a commitment to simplified UX, all in the name of further removing barriers to authentic audience connection.
Voice search is on the rise with more and more brands adapting their marketing strategies to incorporate voice functionality across Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home and more.
With voice devices and services such as Google Home and Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri skyrocketing in use across 2018, consumers are increasingly comfortable with voice-driven, two-way dialogue with brands at unplanned times, often away from a mobile or computer; It’s a different kind of brand engagement, with a starting point that is usually a question (think ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’) and responses more instantaneous and organic than ever. ComScore predicts that, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
Voice search changes the nature of search, increasing the importance of questions and simplicity of responses. This, in turn, increases the need to ensure your brand is front of mind when the question is asked, and positioned as the top informer. It’s a creatively challenging format with potential for big results, especially for brands naturally attuned to answering the most-asked questions.
For example, many breakfast food brands are keen to position themselves as breakfast-time problem solvers. Should they not be vying to answer a likely voice-driven query of ‘How can I make breakfast more exciting?’
Ignoring the nascent new way of searching is a dangerous thing to do. Now is the time for brands to invest time and money into their voice search offering. This will involve many test and learn situations, a new breed of SEO specialist and a commitment to simplified UX, all in the name of further removing barriers to authentic audience connection.
Hello and welcome to your weekly FWD! This week we say goodbye to summer and hello to a new harvest of autumnal updates from the tech world. With a new season comes a new wardrobe and this year you could not only get your hands on the Nike x NBA Connected Jersey that connects wearers to exclusive content, but it’s also rumoured Amazon is working on Alexa-powered smart glasses. Still feeling end-of-Summer blues? Sing them away with the now most streamed song on Spotify!
HEADLINES
- What does $1.1bn allow you to buy? Enter Google, who have purchased HTC’s Pixel mobile division
- OK, well what does $16bn get you? Enter Intel, who have acquired a computer vision software (for autonomous driving purposes)
- Slightly smaller yet no less significant, Apple have changed the Siri IOS browser from Bing to Google
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
As usual, please share anything you find interesting using the hashtag #OMDFWD
This week the remnants of last week’s global cyber attack has continued to hold news. A security blogger known as ‘MalwareTech’, managed to halt the global attack by accidentally finding a hole in the software code. The blogger found the web address attached to the malware unregistered and bought it for eight pounds! This allowed him to see where the computers were accessing it from, instantly triggering a code to halt the spread. Elsewhere, AI maintains a strong position in media news, particularly on the subject of Chatbots and voice-activated devices. Juniper Research predicts Chatbots will save UK businesses £6 billion every year until 2022, the areas of predicted savings are in the healthcare and banking industries. Whilst in connection to voice-activated devices, Amazon remains dominant as American Express has launched payment using Alexa and the new ‘Echo Show’ starts shipping next month.
HEADLINES
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
As always, please share anything you find interesting at #OMDFWD
Welcome to the CES 2017 OMD FWD special. As the dust settles on the Mojave Desert, there’s a quiet acknowledgement of Amazon’s Alexa triumph as the most widely integrated technology. But it’s still early days in voice technology, with little platform loyalty and leadership positions yet to be cemented. We expect 2017 to be an incredibly exciting year for voice AI. Bloomberg reports that the potential is huge as the technology is exponential, with voice AI reaching 40 million homes by 2021.
Elsewhere mobile devices explored 3D cameras, smart home technology merged with mobility, cars got smarter and televisions became thinner. With so much coverage of CES, explore our round-up of the most interesting news articles.
HEADLINES
- In the final tally of the show, Amazon Alexa reigns as the ‘Grand Winner’, and they didn’t even have a booth. Quartz summarises the best in show
- One of the biggest brand stories was from Mattel who launched a kid-focused Echo alternative which is due to launch June 2017. Our children will use these technologies from a very early age as more competitors come into the market
INSIGHTS
COOL
- Robots were everywhere and here are 4 robots you might want in your home. Our money is going to Kuri
- HTC wants to drive the VR revolution by introducing a subscription service: ‘The Netflix for VR’
- A digital sole which learns your running patterns and adapts to support you during terrain changes, or if you began to pronate due to tightness of muscles
- A mechanisation of a human being came in the form of the exo skeleton which has the promise to give mobility to the disabled.
- For a full run down on the coolest gadgets in the show, read our round-up here
DEEP READS
As ever, please read, learn and share away, #OMDFWD
Well, as predicted in my pre-CES piece, the main areas of interest were automotive, robots and VR, although my confident prognostication that ’embeddables’ was going to be the breakout technology for 2017 proved to be a tad off the mark. Actually I was way off. But you can expect me to reuse the same prediction every year until it finally happens…
Anyway, swiftly moving on, let’s take a closer look at how the more successful predictions came to fruition.
AUTOMOTIVE ACCELERATED
Your car is now the largest connected piece of technology that you can own. And every single one of the manufacturers displaying their wares focused on the progress they have made in connecting your vehicle to other devices.
The major innovation for 2017 was the use of voice activation. Both Ford and VW announced their respective collaborations with Amazon ‘Alexa’ whilst Nissan talked about their association with Microsoft ‘Cortana’. Talk to your car and it will politely talk back, whilst simultaneously acting upon your every whim at home – switch on your lights, adjust the central heating or even check what’s in your fridge (assuming you have the right connected appliances of course).
Alternatively, talk to Alexa at home and control various functions of your car, like turning on the air conditioning or checking how much fuel you have left.
And talking of Nissan, I watched the keynote speech by Renault-Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn, at the Westgate Pavilion, where he stated that there will be more change in the automotive sector in the next 10 years than there was in the last 50 years.
He confidently predicted that by 2030 a quarter of all vehicles on the road will be autonomous (and added that this was a “conservative estimate”). He also talked about their alliance with NASA on developing the revolutionary Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) system. What problem does it solve? Well autonomous systems follow strict road rules (such as, your car can never cross solid road lines) so SAM uses a human interface to offer ‘real time’ solutions to complex ‘real world’ problems that even sophisticated algorithms can’t figure out.
Elsewhere we saw China’s answer to Tesla, Faraday Future, launch its vision of an electric production car (as opposed to the outlandish FFZero1 hypercar concept which it revealed at last year’s CES).
The unimaginatively entitled FF91 is fully electric, autonomous and has very cool motorised doors. There are no firm details on when it will be launched or the price but you can put down a $5,000 deposit to get yourself on the list. However, given some of the negative stories circulating about the financial viability of Faraday I won’t be one of them.
TV WENT ON A DIET
Can you imagine a TV as thin as a credit card? Well, LG can. And it did: the new LG Signature 4K OLED W series. The W stands for wallpaper and refers to the TV’s new “picture-on-wall” design. Its dual system has the main display underpinned by a Dolby Atmos Soundbar. That very same Soundbar also houses the TV’s primary guts, HDMI inputs and so forth. But it’s that screen which is the key feature coming in at a mere 2.57 millimeters thick.
VR WENT FROM INTERACTIVE TO IMMERSIVE
Samsung finally demonstrated how far VR has come since the Oculus Rift took CES by storm just a few short years ago. Their five-arena immersive oasis was simply stupendous and one of the real highlights of this year’s show. Want to take a bobsleigh ride, fly shotgun on a stunt plane, throw buildings at a rival robot or even go on a Star Wars X-Fighter mission? No problem, Samsung Gear offered the opportunity to experience them all, and provide a genuine taster as to what immersive entertainment will become over the next few years.
ROBOTS GOT WEIRD
Smart home assistants, such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home, became an unexpected Christmas 2016 consumer hit. But given the new kit we saw on display at CES this week, it will make these simple voice activated units obsolete rather swiftly.
Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics demonstrated its Sophia Bot late in 2016 and, although it was a huge leap forward in the development of animated expressions/emotional intelligence, it still looked somewhat creepy. Or is it just me?
At CES it showcased the latest version of the same technology, which took strange to a whole new level. Professor Einstein is a 14.5″ Wi-Fi-connected robot which is designed along the lines of Amazon Alexa, albeit with a very different outward appearance…
RANDOM STUFF THAT NO-ONE EXPECTED
This is the Kickstarter style, off-the-wall, oddball tech that nobody could have predicted apart from the crazy people who invented it. And as usual, there was plenty on display.
For starters, what about the Kolibree? It is the world’s first toothbrush with Artificial Intelligence. With the associated app you can gamify your brushing experience (seriously, you cannot make this stuff up) to ensure you clean your teeth properly.
Not convinced? Me neither. So next up, we have VR shoes from Taclim. The footwear literally allows you to walk in the shoes of your virtual heroes and can simulate a variety of terrains (from sand to snow). They look a bit like Croc sandals so even though the enhanced gameplay might be cool, you certainly won’t look chic whilst wearing them.
Talking of cool, what about a levitating speaker system? Well thanks to the Crazybaby Mars you can have your mind officially blown. It looks a bit like an Amazon Alexa, replete with funky blue lights (naturally) and a free floating dome. It’s also not just a gimmick as the sound quality is incredible. Until I saw and heard it, I had no idea that I needed one in my life.
So there you have it, another tech fest over for another year. Did CES 2017 live up to expectation? Whoa, did it ever. Leaving Las Vegas. And out.
This article was originally posted at M&M Global – http://mandmglobal.com/2-4-million-square-foot-of-whoa-ces-2017-reviewed/
2017 marked both the 50th anniversary and my first attendance to CES. I couldn’t have been more excited to see it all in action. Whilst it seemed nearly impossible to experience every single inch of the vast booths of new tech, entrepreneurs, and titans of innovation, the OMD Word team and I eagerly explored as much as possible, gaining several thousand steps on our wearables in the process.
It comes as no surprise, CES delivered on being a fantastic incubator for viewing trends within innovation. As these trends reach mass consumers, social media becomes the hotbed capturing consumers’ responses and participation within these trends. Three key themes continuously bubbled up to the top when walking the conference. While not entirely new to the world of CES, these themes have the capability of reshaping consumers’ behaviour on social media. We’ll call them the three A’s of CES 2017: Autonomous, AI, and the prospective bell of the ball, Alexa.
First up, Autonomous
Autonomous cars increased in sophistication and the metaphorical road got way more crowded this year. After achieving the ability to take consumers from one place to another, the focus expanded to how these vehicles could communicate with each other making transportation even safer and more efficient by reducing traffic buildups. How consumers will occupy their time once the physical act of driving is removed as a necessity still remains to be seen. But it allows for a variety of entertainment and connection opportunities via a new touch point of consumers’ attention.
AI
Throughout the conference, AI weaved its way across robotics, to self-driving cars, to health and fitness, and everything in between. With the ever-growing surge of big data, 2017 AI fosters personalization of experiences across robotic home companions, sleep technology, and intelligent assistants. Even better, the more these AI devices learn and interact with consumers the smarter they become. This especially rings true within health and fitness, where there was a large presence of ingredient brands to grow the market of bio feedback. Gamification of health and fitness nurtures the socialisation of precise bio feedback potentially popping up on social platforms, as consumers have increased motivation to do better and beat out their friends and family.
Alexa
With the rise of voice activation technology, such as Alexa, consumers will be given new tools and ways to connect within their social spheres generating new types of shareable content. Both editorial publishers and social platforms alike will be responsible for finding the interesting and compelling way to share the new consumer experiences. Practically at every turn, companies were trying to dovetail voice activation tech, Alexa specifically, to their products in conventional and unconventional ways. Voice analytics, including emotional tracking through voice, was lightly sprinkled through the conference creating opportunities for consumers to deepen their understanding of their social interactions both within the physical and digital world.
As the three A’s of CES 2017 continue to trickle out to mass consumers, cultural adoption of connected, intelligent devices across multiple touch points within their lives will advance. With the ease of connecting to everything and the sheer immediacy of it, one hypothesis I have is consumers’ social platform behaviours will start to merge and be less siloed. Consumers’ mindsets will shift from needing to share a specific, individual piece of content across a specific social platform, to having a multi-pronged experience to share across their social ecosystem. In this collapse of the more traditional existing social silos, social platforms will need to adapt to the new consumer demand of a social ecosystem rather than an echo chamber. However in the true spirit of innovation at CES and perpetually dynamic nature of human social behaviours, only time will tell if I’m right or wrong.
Similar to previous years, the social platforms themselves got in on the action of CES.
Facebook lead the pack as the “official” social media partner of CES 2017. Pumping out exhaustive editorial content, on-site interviews, and virtual tours, Facebook served the role of a crucial resource of information for attendees. Not surprisingly, Twitter was not going to let the Facebook relationship go unanswered. Continuing to position themselves as the real time platform, Twitter showed up with prominent on-site branding and a heavy focus on live streamed content, on the heels of their announcement of 360 live videos.
All in all, CES 2017 did not disappoint and perfectly served up the recipe of its 50 years of success. Our industry moves fast and in unexpected directions sometimes, and CES continues to be the conference where we can get together to be delightfully surprised and inspired.
Traditional e-commerce websites may be good for shopping when you know what you’re looking for. But for those times when you don’t, Instagram has introduced new features. These new features will help users identify products in Instagram photos from brands. Vishal Shah, Instagram’s Head of Product Management for Monetization, mentions that even though we have seen progress in mobile purchasing “these two things — discovery and the actual purchase — are just not well-connected like in physical stores”. The feature will enable retailers to price label their products on the platform and then direct customers to their mobile website – still not enabling users to purchase through the app. However, Shah does mention that commerce will evolve into big business in the future – either through ads or a cut in sales.
HEADLINES
- Facebook is a hive of activity, reporting very strong Q3 fiscal results, testing instant games it now wants to start selling TV spots on TVs through Apple TV and Roku
- In a move that will please e-commerce teams, Instagram is set to add some shoppable features
- WhatsApp tests Status, a new feature that’s like Snapchat stories as the platform continues to evolve
INSIGHTS
COOL
DEEP READS
Share anything you see through the week with the hashtag #OMDFWD
