What comes after the Smartphones?

Gary Vaynerchuck recently asked a crowded room during one of his speeches,

“How many of you would surgically attach your phone to your body right now if you could?”

15% of the room raised their hands.

As I would count myself among this 15%, it’s painfully clear that I and many I know are hopelessly attached to our phones. So what would it take for us to ditch our phones and latch on to “the next big thing”? Many have tried to build and market the future indispensable gadget, and many have failed.

The over-hyped Google Glass fell short by miles.

Apple Watch and FitBit made a few waves, but turned out to be not much more than nice, little add-ons.

As for Oculus Rift? The general public isn’t going to adopt it in a major way any time soon.

You can absolutely look at some of these innovative products and say they still have some promise, and that may be true. But if you’re honest with yourself, you know your smartphone won’t be leaving your pocket or purse without some serious game-changer in the mix. So what’s next?

In 2016, the technology industry has focused on a couple things – voice control and cognitive computing — think the Amazon Echo Super Bowl commercial and the big Google Home reveal at I/O.

If I had to guess, I’d say you’re imagining the slow and frustrating Siri function on your iPhone right now. If you are, you’d be pretty close. There are essentially three big problems that held back digital voice assistants like Siri in the past:

• They can’t 100% accomplish enough of our daily tasks to make them more useful than just doing it with our phones.
• It doesn’t always get it right the first time around.
• It doesn’t respond fast enough.

Here’s why voice control is a big deal – things are quickly changing. Apple acquired one of the best in voice recognition, Vocal IQ, last year. Google’s voice recognition went from 80% accuracy to above 90% in 2015. This means you won’t have to try two or three times to get your phone to hear you correctly any more. Meanwhile, more and more people have access to high speed data everywhere they go; and, when you pair that with increasingly powerful technology, digital assistant responses are now close to instantaneous.

Furthermore, Alexa (Amazon Echo) and Google Home are changing the game when it comes to the sheer number of things you can accomplish with them. Imagine the following:

• Instead of tip-tapping away on your phone, say “Alexa, get me an Uber” — time spent reduced to a single second.
• Don’t scroll through songs, just say “Hey Google, play Christmas music in all rooms” to get your December mood going in your whole house.
• Don’t wash the flour off your hands and reach for your phone, just say “Alexa, how many cups go into the Italian breaded garlic chicken recipe?”
• Don’t pull out your phone on the road and start typing, just say “Alexa, I’m lost get me home”

But the best part is, this works with just about any mobile app, so its functions are essentially infinite.  Amazon encourages third parties and mobile integration companies like ENO8 to tie the apps we are building into the Echo device while they’re being developed. That way, it can respond to certain voice commands. Spotify, Domino’s, and Uber are a few off a long list of brands that have their apps do this.

In fact, I’ve passively made it a habit to speak my texts instead of typing them out just because of how much time it saves. Voice control is fundamentally changing our lives whether we like it or not – and it just might have the power to take our smartphones out of our hands sooner than you think.

Having a mobile app that can integrate voice commands with a device like Amazon Echo is absolutely essential for many brands today.  We at ENO8 can help you out with that. Check out what makes ENO8 different right here.