(2014-09-01) Intelligent Assistant Consolidation

Nova Spivack thinks it's time for consolidation (M And A) in the Intelligent Software Assistant market.

One of the companies I advise, Next IT, has gone to great lengths to create IVA’s with fully-developed personas — ranging from SGT STAR for the U.S. Army to Aetna’s Ann. These IVAs have a tone, a personality, a sense of humor and a vernacular custom-suited to their use cases. But even those personalities required proficiency in other facets of the technology, such as an expertly developed domain model. If you chat with the above examples, you’ll see how the two pieces interact very differently.

Because intelligent virtual assistants are focused within a domain model, they benefit from a clearly defined knowledge base and are able to go much deeper and stay within those bounds, whereas general purpose assistants like Apple‘s Siri are often asked to deal with users’ wide-ranging and often disorganized goals.

This is yet another argument for consolidation — building and implementing a cross-domain view of the world is a challenge, very likely bigger than any single company or customer. We likely won’t have “one assistant to rule them all,” but rather a team of assistants, each aware of its strengths and weaknesses, always collaborating in the background, delegating and stratifying based on the task at hand.

Personalization may be the biggest impediment to achieving that completeness of vision right now.

Consolidation will finally bring about the realization of an end-to-end “cognition as a service,” and as I’ve argued before, Caa S is the next OS battlefield. This is Platform War-s 3.0. *