Dries Buytaert | Vox

Here’s how the web gets ‘conversation-optimized’

2016-06-03T06:00:07-04:00

Amazon’s Echo and other conversational technologies are proof that the web is undergoing a massive re-architecture to bring relevant content directly to the consumer. | George W. Bailey / Shutterstock

Ever since IBM’s Watson beat its first human “Jeopardy” contestants, people have been fascinated with the idea of talking to computers. In recent months, there has been lots of buzz about conversational technology — including Amazon Echo (a.k.a. Alexa), Facebook’s Messenger and Microsoft’s “Conversation-as-a-Platform.” An impressive new entrant in the field of AI-powered assistants, Viv promises to answer even the most complicated queries that include a user’s social graph and contextual information.

The real question is not whether technologies like Alexa, Viv or Messenger will replace the traditional web, but how can the web work better to supply conversational technologies with information. Individuals and companies will continue to create websites for a long time, but the technology behind websites must adapt to a world where people are regularly speaking or texting with computers.

The web community optimizes for new platforms

Overall, I’m pretty optimistic about making conversational technologies work on the web. I don’t define “the web” as websites alone, but rather as any user experience that’s delivered across multiple channels and devices. New user experience and distribution platforms only come along every five to 10 years, and when they do, they cause massive shifts in the web’s underlying technology. The last big one was mobile, and the web industry adapted.

The first thing to evolve for mobile was content strategy: People optimized headlines and began designing layouts for smaller screens. Next, the technology had to evolve to keep up, with solutions emerging such as responsive design, push notifications, native application development frameworks and more. The same is true with conversational technologies; it’s first about optimizing content, and then about working on the technology to make these changes second nature.

Video: A glimpse into the future

Web developers and site builders are now contending with experiences across platforms including watches, cars, voice assistants and more. But how do we create a better two-way “conversation” between various platforms and the existing web? Luckily, many devices like Amazon Echo have fairly open developer ecosystems for testing.

My team recently built a demo for Echo based on a hypothetical supermarket chain called Gourmet Market. Gourmet Market wants its customers to not only use the website, but also Echo or push notifications to do business with them. We built a website using the content management system Drupal 8 and connected it to Amazon Echo to have her “answer” questions about which produce items were on sale. In this demo, Alexa also notified a customer via text when a certain requested item went on sale in the future. While this seems like a relatively simple user experience — ask question, get information, set notifications for future — no website offers this capability today, to the best of my knowledge.

Today, hardly anyone questions whether to build a mobile-optimized website. A decade from now, we’ll be saying the same thing about optimizing content for voice or chat commands.

In oversimplified terms, we taught Alexa to talk to the Gourmet Market website by programming a specific “Skill,” or custom capability. On the website’s side, a store manager can tag certain items as “on sale,” and Alexa’s voice responses will automatically and instantly reflect those changes. The store manager needs no expertise in programming — Alexa composes its response by talking to Drupal 8 using web service APIs.

Today, hardly anyone questions whether to build a mobile-optimized website. A decade from now, we’ll be saying the same thing about optimizing content for voice or chat commands. The convenience of the customer experience will be a key differentiator. As a result, no one will think twice about optimizing their websites for multiple interaction patterns, including conversational interfaces like voice and chat. Anyone will be able to deliver a continuous user experience across multiple channels, devices and interaction patterns.

Echo and other conversational technologies are proof that the web is undergoing a massive re-architecture to bring relevant content directly to the consumer. It won’t be long until music fans can use voice interfaces to get alerted when their favorite artists are touring through town and purchase tickets. Patients could automatically re-order prescriptions from the pharmacy when their supply was running low. Commuters could be told to bring an umbrella to work before having to ask their virtual assistants anything about the weather. Once we master multichannel content delivery, each new technology will become infinitely more useful to people around the world.

Dries Buytaert is an open source developer and a technology executive. He is the creator and project lead for Drupal, an open source platform for building websites. Buytaert is also the co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a company that helps large organizations build, deliver and optimize digital experiences. He blogs frequently on Drupal, open source, startups, business and the future at buytaert.net. Reach him @dries.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

No, Data Is Eating the World

2019-03-06T05:16:25-05:00

Marc Andreessen famously said that “software is eating the world.” While I certainly agree with Marc that software companies are redefining our economies, I believe that much of that technological shift is being driven by data. So, is the value of a business in the data, or in the software? I believe the value is increasingly more in the data, and not the software. Let’s investigate why:

Data-driven experiences

Netflix provides a great example of a data-driven, customer-centric company. By introducing streaming video, its software “ate” the traditional DVD business. But Netflix soon realized that its future wasn’t in the medium of delivery — it was in the wealth of data generated simply by people using the service. The day-to-day data generated by Netflix viewers provides a crucial ingredient to competing in the marketplace and defining the company’s mission: Improving the quality of the service.

To that end, Netflix uses passive data — the information gathered quietly in the background without disrupting users’ natural behaviors — to provide TV and movie recommendations, as well as to optimize the quality of services, such as streaming speed, playback quality, subtitles or closed captioning. Of course, Netflix subscribers can contribute active feedback to the company, such as movie reviews or feedback on the accuracy of a translation, but the true value of Netflix’s data is in the quiet, zero-effort observation that allows the company to optimize experiences with no friction or disruption to regular user behavior. In fact, the company even hosted several competitions to invent better algorithms for user ratings, with a winning prize of $1 million.

Within very saturated marketplaces, data is also becoming a key differentiator for some companies. For example, when Google first started, its value was almost entirely centered around the quality of its PageRank algorithm, or its “software.” But Google did not rest on the laurels of having good software, and it prioritized data-driven insights as the future of the company.

Consider Google’s Waze, the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app. Waze relies heavily on both active consumer input and passive location-based data, combined with a sophisticated routing algorithm. The routing algorithm alone would not be enough to differentiate Waze from the other navigation systems of the world. Consumers are demanding more accurate maps and real-time traffic information, which could not happen without the use of data.

The future of software

There is another element in the rising importance of data: Not only is the sheer amount of consumer data growing, but software is simultaneously becoming much easier to build. Developers can leverage new software programming tools, open source and Internet-based services to build more complex software in less time. As a result, the underlying intrinsic value of software companies is diminishing.

Netflix and Google are still disruptive companies, but no longer primarily because of their software — it’s their ability to use the data their customers produce to extend their engagement with customers. Their actual software is increasingly being commoditized; recommendation engines and navigation software both exist in open source, and are no longer trade secrets. Customer data has proved itself immutable and irreducible as it comes more clearly into focus through interactive application usage.

Tomorrow’s applications will consume multiple sources of data to create a fine-grained context. They will leverage calendar data, location data, historic clickstream data, social contacts, information from wearables, and much more. All that rich data will be used as the input for predictive analytics and personalization services. Eventually, data-driven experiences will be the norm.

And this basic idea doesn’t even begin to cover the advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning and beyond — collectively called “machine intelligence.” Looking forward even more, computers will learn to do things themselves from data, rather than being programmed by hand. They can learn faster themselves than we’d be able to program them. In a world where software builds itself, computers will only be limited by the data they can or cannot access, not by their algorithms. In such a future, is the value in the software or in the data?

Rethinking business

As value shifts from software to the ability to leverage data, companies will have to rethink their businesses, just as Netflix and Google did. In the next decade, data-driven, personalized experiences will continue to accelerate, and development efforts will shift towards using contextual data collected through passive user behaviors.

Companies of the future have a lot on their plates. More than ever, they’ll need to adapt to all types and formats of data (closed, open, structured and unstructured); leverage that data to make their product or service better for users; navigate the gray area around privacy concerns; and even reconsider the value of their intellectual property derived from software. They’ll have to do all this while providing more contextualized, personalized and automated experiences. In the future, “data-centric” will spell a win-win situation users and businesses alike.

Dries Buytaert created Drupal, an open source content management platform, in his dorm room. The platform has since grown to power one in 50 of the world’s websites, and has captured a passionate and active developer base. Dries is also co-founder and CTO at Acquia, a company providing enterprise software for websites and commerce. Reach him @dries.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.