While smartphones represent the most convenient way for businesses to engage their customers, the emergence of IoT is expected to usher in a new generation of devices, ending the reign of smartphones. As mobile apps are no longer made just for smartphones, we believe the key shifts in mobility will center on how we interact with the device rather than on the changes to the device itself.
People are increasingly embracing intelligent apps that allow them to execute tasks quickly and easily with zero or low touch; with these apps, they also have relevant, contextual information at their fingertips that allow them to make informed decisions.
The intelligent app opportunity
How can businesses get ahead of the fast-moving trend towards intelligent apps?
When it comes to enterprise apps, we have an opportunity to provide relevant information at the point of decision-making or action. In the consumer space, we would be well-served by staying current on evolving user needs and expectations and responding to them in a timely way.
Four paths to intelligent apps
There’s usually more than one way to do something, and that goes for intelligent apps. Here are four ways to make apps smart:
1) Intelligent interactions
What are Intelligent interactions and their benefits?
Broadly speaking, intelligent interactions occur when an app completes a task without users having to tap or click their way through a command resulting in a streamlined experience. There is a huge market opportunity to migrate from the legacy ‘touch-and-navigate’ user experience to the modern ‘converse, interact and accomplish’ paradigm.
Ways that intelligent interactions can take shape include the following:
A prerequisite for building intelligent apps is a deep understanding of business processes. Building intelligent interactions starts with these questions:
Examples of intelligent interactions
2) Intelligent APIs
Traditionally, web services are exposed as REST or SOAP APIs over a remote server or in the cloud, and are always utilized by mobile apps over the network. Emergence of AR and VR are paving the way for modern mobile app development in areas like retail, manufacturing and sales.
What has changed over time to achieve new ways of building intelligent mobile apps?
Examples of intelligent APIs – Google VR SDK and ARCore
3) Intelligent data
According to an Ericsson study, 70 percent of the world will be using smartphones by 2020. As a result, data collected by mobile apps and sent to servers for deriving outcomes will become exponentially massive.
How does this affect the development of intelligent mobile apps?
How can this be rectified?
Examples of intelligent data
TensorFlow for mobile: Traditionally, the high-end GPU computing required for deep learning and neural networks have always occurred at remote cloud servers. Yet, sending and receiving all this big data over the network is both expensive and time-consuming. TensorFlow for mobile makes it possible to build interactive intelligent apps.
Core ML 2: Built on top of low-level technologies like Metal and Accelerate, Apple’s Core ML 2 provides a way to run machine learning models on the device so that data doesn’t need to leave the device that is to be analyzed.
Additionally, developers should enable online consumers to protect their privacy by:
4) Intelligent voice
A recent statistic published by VoiceBot AI states that more than half of U.S. smartphone owners use voice assistants. This trend underlies demand by consumers for mobile apps to handle voice-based commands so that users can take actions quickly.
Benefits of voice-enabled mobile apps include:
Intelligent voice examples
Futuristic use cases include:
Shankar Kumarasamy,
Lead Consultant, Wipro
As a lead consultant in Wipro’s mobility practice, Shankar helps clients adopt new technologies and solutions to realize on their digital transformation journey. Since joining Wipro in 2007 as a college recruit from Anna University, Shankar has specialized in mobile technologies. His expertise includes the technical nuts and bolts of implementing mobility projects as well as designing mobility solutions around popular mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.