Categories: CortanaPersonal Assistants

Digital Assistants are indeed emerging as a new platform

I just came across the “Why the iPhone Is Finally Fading” article. The author makes the case that it’s the emergence of devices for digital assistants the cause of the recent iPhone sales slowdown.

The article reminded me of the years prior to Cortana and the predictions that I and others in the industry were making at the time (here’s a post of mine from back in 2013: “Convergence of User Experiences”). Our prediction was that digital assistants and NUIs would be the natural next step in the evolution of how humans interact with knowlege, consume services, and perform tasks. It’s fun to now observe the humble beginnings of that predicted transformation.

I recently wrote a historical perspective of how we got here (unfortunately I can’t share it). I attempted to summarize what I believe are the key platforms with the following diagram.

PCs, the web, mobile devices, and application-platforms (e.g. Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, …) aren’t going away any time soon. However, we are witnessing the emergence of digital assistants as a viable competitor of the other platforms.
Interesting times!

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Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about