ThoughtWorks: The theme for the latest edition of Technology Radar is Conversational UI and natural language processing.
Conversation—a new way to interact with applications—took the ecosystem by storm with tools such as Siri, Cortana, and Allo, and then extended into homes with devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.
Building conversational and natural language user interfaces, while presenting new challenges, has obvious benefits. The team behind the Echo intentionally omitted a screen, forcing them to rethink many human-machine interactions.
The conversational trend is not just limited to voice; as messaging apps have grown to dominate both phones and workplaces, we see conversations with other humans being supplemented by intelligent chatbots. As these platforms improve, they will learn to understand the context and intent of conversations, making interactions more lifelike and therefore more compelling.
The explosion of interest in the marketplace and mainstream media leads to a corresponding rise in developer interest in this new personal exocortex interaction mode.
Source: Technology Trends for 2017 | Technology Radar | ThoughtWorks
