Speech recognition will reach the “plateau of productivity” (where mainstream adoption starts to take off) within the next two years, while six other technologies are predicted to reach mainstream business adoption within the next two- to five years.
Gartner’s 2018 Hype Cycle research identifies 40 key technologies and describes how they will impact business performance in the digital workplace during the next 10 years.
“The effects of speech recognition can be seen on a daily basis. Consumers and workers increasingly interact with applications without touching a keyboard,” said Matthew Cain, vice president and analyst at Gartner.
“Speech-to-text applications have proliferated due to the adoption of chatbots and virtual personal assistants (VPAs) by businesses, and consumer adoption of devices with speech interactions including smartphones, gaming consoles and specifically, VPA speakers.
Among the technologies expected to reach business mainstream adoption are:
Chatbots and virtual assistants (VAs) represent a value-added implementation of speech recognition. VAs use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to assist people or automate tasks. They listen to and observe behaviours, build and maintain data models, and predict and recommend actions.
Two fifths (38 per cent) of organisations are planning to implement or actively experimenting with the technology according to Gartner’s earlier 2018 CIO survey.
Augmented analytics and personal analytics are making analytics available to more employees, allowing everyone the opportunity to become “citizen data scientists”.
Gartner anticipates that citizen data science will rapidly become an important part of the way data science capabilities are enable and scaled throughout the organisation and urges data and analytics leaders to embrace augmented analytics as part of their digital transformation strategies.
Gartner also predicts that, by 2020, more than 40 per cent of data science tasks will be automated, resulting in increased productivity and broader usage by citizen data scientists.
Commenting on the research findings, Richard Chiumento, director of Rialto Consultancy, said: “We are already seeing this technology in use in the workplace but Gartner’s Hype Cycle highlights to us that many of these will be in the mainstream in as little as two years’ time. Some already overlap with the technology employees are using at home and they will expect to find speech recognition, for example, in the workplace.”
He added: “Not only must leaders be aware of the impact they will have on how people perform functions but also how they engage with their work and the organisation. Indeed, the use of such technologies will also contribute to the employer brand in the future and will help to attract the next generation of talent.”
