TREND MONITOR®

This year is all about being in the here and now, everything needs to happen immediately, any small inconvenience is seen as disastrous. We at Baba are closely watching the #VIRTUALITY trend as it continues to rise in new markets every day.

The #VIRTUALITY trend is starting to reveal itself in the realm of personal assistants through Google’s latest innovation. Recently, Google showcased their newest technology, which has a robot, call service retailers to set up appointments on behalf of consumers. The service creates realistic sounding calls with the robot utilizing small quips that would happen in a conversation; such as when a reservation time is rejected the robot would audibly sound as if it is contemplating while it is waiting for consumers new time. The interesting thing about the robot is inherently that the person on the other end of the line may not know that they are actually speaking to a robot. The service comes out of this year’s constant trend of companies utilizing automated intelligence to make offer greater convenience to the consumer.

As we have detailed in our #THENOWAGE report, consumers have become obsessed with having services in the moment and are gradually losing their will to wait. This presents a problem to businesses as they now must innovate to keep up with the consumers instant demands. This idea of innovation has more recently come in the form of automated intelligence like Google is doing currently. While efficient, automated intelligence takes away the human component of services and continually steps closer to humans losing their sense of reality. This is the core of our #VIRTUALITY trend, consumers are losing themselves to robotic intelligence as it gives them an outlet to remove themselves from any human interactions.

Google’s reservation robot makes almost every restaurant operate on the same values that the application OpenTable does. OpenTable is an application that allows for the consumer to book a table reservation at a restaurant without ever interacting with anyone from the restaurant itself. The app is extremely popular but evidently does have some issues in more rural areas where restaurants may not have the money or will to put themselves onto the it. Google’s innovation does away with that issue as it is physically having the conversation with the restaurant confirming the reservation.

The news of automated intelligence making its way into the world of everyday tasks is nothing new, in fact it has been rising fairly steadily. Recently an automated locking company, titled August, partnered with popular home renting service Airbnb to offer hosts a way to give their renters access to their homes without ever meeting them. The lock service works via an app which makes the renters own smartphone the key to the home, pushing the idea of reducing human interactions in favor of a more automated process.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/what-is-google-duplex/

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/26/august-can-now-generate-smart-entry-codes-for-airbnb-guests/