You'll be asking your Siri or Duer or Cortana to order food, book flights, make restaurant bookings, call a cab, have your car repaired and call customer service.
You'll be asking your Siri or Duer or Cortana to order food, book flights, make restaurant bookings, call a cab, have your car repaired and call customer service.
Tech companies compete to create virtual assistants for a piece of the digital world’s next big money-spinner.
In a short ad film released in China this week, Chinese celebrity Angelababy was transported into an animation where her life was made wonderfully easy by a newly launched service: an intelligent virtual assistant called Duer.
It can book her into a hotel that allows pets (because it knows she has a cat), it can order her favourite latte from Starbucks, and it can find and buy her discounted tickets at her local cinema.
Duer is the latest addition to the roster of search, e-commerce and delivery services provided by Chinese technology giant Baidu - China's Google. And it's just entered a fierce race.
The five biggest technology companies in the Western world are each competing to create their own virtual assistants - your personal guides to help navigate the digital world.
They are all "artificially intelligent", which means they understand what you're asking for and learn your preferences, almost like a human assistant.
Facebook recently announced a concierge service called "M" through its Messenger app, and most people have already played with Apple's Siri (which got a big upgrade last week for the new Apple TV).
Add to that Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon, which has the Echo - a voice-activated living-room device that can control the ambience of your home - and the stage is set for a showdown.
The winner is playing for high stakes - they get to be the platform through which you conduct your entire digital life. You will be asking your Siri or Duer or Cortana to order food, book flights, make restaurant bookings, call a cab, have your car repaired, call customer service and buy everything.
It's the super-charged, super-lucrative Search 2.0.
So what's in it for the companies?
The advantages are two-fold: this deeper understanding of the humans that use their services (and exactly what they need) means the virtual assistants are the ultimate personal profiling tool.
Having this detailed dataset about your intimate needs, combined with knowledge of the routes you travel, your search history and the content of your emails and texts means far better ad targeting - the primary revenue model for companies like Google.
The other major driver is e-commerce: they are all sharpening their AI skills in a bid to broker more buying through their services.
Artificial intelligence may seem like the domain of geeks and scientists, but increasingly it is intertwined with our everyday lives.
According to technology research firm Tractica, the artificial intelligence market is set to reach US$11.1 billion ($16.7 billion) by 2024.
"There's an element of AI in everything we do," says Behshad Behzadi, principal engineer of Google Now.
"It's just a way to interpret correctly either what the user is saying right now, or what they might need in the future."
The impact of a machine that understands you and learns from your habits will stretch beyond the ability to speak a question into your smartphone and get an answer. An artificially intelligent assistant could make everyday decisions easier, or even take them over completely.
Take Baidu's Duer. The AI assistant will actually complete tasks on your behalf, not just tell you how. You can ask Duer to order dinner from your favourite restaurant, and it will know you like spicy food (maybe you ordered a curry or Sichuan cuisine last time).
Once you've picked something from its suggestions, it will be delivered by Baidu's network of 10,000 delivery men on electric scooters.
You can use Duer to book online movie tickets at your local cinema, make an appointment at a spa or gym and book pet grooming services.
"We're very, very different from Siri or Cortana, because our assistant is services-oriented," says Baidu's Kaiser Kuo.
The business model is commission-based - Baidu takes a cut of anything booked through Duer. Although it currently offers subsidised deals, the plan is to build up enough of a user base to make it a major revenue driver.
In a parallel move, Facebook is testing its secretary, called M, within its Messenger app which will also complete tasks for you.
Apparently, it can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, make travel arrangements and is powered by a combination of AI and real people.
As Facebook's David Marcus told Wired magazine, "We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do.
"Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that's an opportunity for us to [make money] over time."
The move to e-commerce is clear for Google and Microsoft too. Google recently launched a pilot of its fresh-food delivery service in the US, to compete with services like Amazon Fresh. Google chairman Eric Schmidt has said: "Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon.
"People don't think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon."
The plan? To make it easier for people to buy things via Google.
The virtual assistant that wins - and the company behind it - will know you better than you know yourself, so you can't live without it. That's the ultimate prize.
Vivino: a sommelier in your back pocket
Vivino allows users to take photos of wine labels and restaurant wine lists and match the images against the millions of wines in the database. Photo / Janna Dixon
Starting from humble beginnings and lukewarm user reviews five years ago, Vivino has now become an essential app for more than 11.3 million wine-lovers around the world.
The impetus for the app was simple: Danish founders Heini Zachariassen and Theis Sondergaard were laymen in the world of wine and wanted to create something that other ordinary consumers could use to gauge the quality of different vintages.
Today, the app has a database covering 7.3 million wines, 202,000 wineries and 2000 growing regions, and providing to users 11.2 million reviews, 33 million ratings, 2.2 million prices and 166 million scanned labels.
It allows users to take photos of wine labels and restaurant wine lists and match the images against the millions of wines in the database.
Regular Vivino user and tech commentator Peter Griffin said he thought he knew his wine until he spent two weeks in France's Dordogne region cycling between chateaus.
"By punching the name and vintage of the wines on the fulsome menus into Vivino I was instantly able to find out what a crowd of amateur wine snobs scattered all over the world thought of the particular wine, what food I should match with it and how much I should be prepared to pay for it."
The app is available on Android, Apple and Windows devices.
