There is an evident shift from being merely digital to building technology into products and services. Whether it is designing user experience or enterprise architecture, a larger transformation propelled by emerging technology trends is reshaping daily life across environments (home, office, and car). Converging technologies are not only reimagining business models and helping in establishing new functions, but it is also providing new opportunities.

 

In this blog, let us look at areas which will allow organizations to embed technology into everything, tap into a reservoir of possibilities and create value on every front. 

 

Conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence)

 

In 2018, we witnessed some fantastic developments across Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) along with intent recognition impacting the consumer appeal of digital personal assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo.

 

In the coming years, Machine learning and more importantly deep learning will significantly advance across domains like object, facial and speech recognition overcoming initial hiccups of conversational AI. Considering data in massive corpora, speech synthesis will give way to intent recognition that picks on sentences from human-machine conversations to trace out the wants and underlying desires of the person speaking. 

 

Connected Environments

 

Bain & Company in their recent study estimated IoT to be worth $520 billion by the end of 2021, doubling the figure of 2017. From smart homes and offices to fitness trackers and connected enterprise infrastructure, intelligent devices will change the game for Edge Computing, paving the way toward complex digital ecosystems. 

 

For a concept like IoT bundling, which is new and binding, telecom companies are keen to deliver tailored solutions for consumers. Take HARMAN Spark for instance; connected car environs that pack a wealth of different features like location resolution, roadside assistance, driving alerts & car diagnostics all under one hood. Also, the culmination of global digitalization efforts has made it possible for smart cities to emerge as a reality and 2019 could be the year to witness it come to life. Connected devices will be sharing the work burden primarily for all essential services like utility management, traffic control, safety and communication as vehicle sharing companies emerge to merge right into the system, with traffic lights and power meters for monitoring and preventing traffic jam.

 

Connected and Intelligent Devices

 

As per the Zion Market Research, smart home tech market is predicted to reach a figure of $53.45 billion by the close of 2022. As devices like Alexa, Echo and Google Home become more common, AI integration shall reach newer heights of sophistication. Smart homes in 2019 shall see a lot of cameras, smart lights and digital assistants to make life easier, simpler and safer. Starting with room sensors to detect your position making use of powerful radio waves and calling for medical help if one falls and turn unconscious. 

 

Water management sounds like a dry metaphor but not for a device that sits on the main water pipe monitoring any leak that might occur inside the walls. With Smart Locks Doorbells, surveillance is another such field that will gain paramount importance along with homeowner data sharing and appliance diagnostics. So, the coming year might be the time when one will be able to monitor your home while still away and ask your fridge to order your favorite food before you arrive (although having it cooked and ready for you to eat when you walk through the door may still take a few years).

 

Digital Healthcare

 

While IoT observes growth across most sectors, by the end of 2019 alone, more than 87 percent of organizations will have made seamless integration towards a digital health care system, according to Allied Market Research. The evolution of smart pills, EHR (Electronic Health Records), connected hospitals and personal care will undoubtedly ensure a high degree of hope for patients all around. With continuous innovation in healthcare, IoT has made it possible to usher maximum opportunities that include:

 

  • Processing and forwarding of metrics related to patient data, using wearable health monitoring devices
  • Remote monitoring for chronic symptoms
  • Effective streamlining of healthcare database ensuring the protection of data and ease of access to information

 

Critically this paves the way to move from reactive to preventative care and will help organizations to ensure that their employees are as fit and healthy (and therefore productive) as possible.

 

Smart Transportation

 

Unarguably, AI and advanced analytic techniques in transportation are worth the hype, and of late there have been quite a few success stories. AI as an entity has witnessed a steady surge in research building upon pioneering ideas from the ’70s, bringing together neural networks and generic algorithms to play. With self-driven UBERs and autonomous trucks already making a foray, the implications are widespread. Forbes estimates that by 2020, 250 million smart cars along with another 10 million self-driven vehicles shall ply the roads globally. 

 

In the coming year, personal travel assistants will offer rich user experience both on land as well as on sea. With devices like HARMAN Smart Auto and Sprint Drive, connected navigation will grow to become a preferred choice for consumers.

 

Companies investing in technology aiming for competitive advantage should be serious about infusing emerging tech across the likes of cloud innovation, analytics, DevOps, deep learning and others.