A Day in the Future
What was it the clients said at the December meeting? A financial advisor launches a CRM application and brings up the household’s profile. The profile contains a list of interactions in different formats— video, voice, email and social media based on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat integrations. The data is stored securely in a compliant manner and can be played back anytime.
The advisor searches a transcript of all audio conversations in the last quarter. One issue keeps coming up—setting up a trust fund for the teenaged grandkids. Looking at sentiment analysis, the advisor can see the clients become more anxious when they mention instilling the right values about an inheritance.
The advisor tags financial education as a high priority concern for the couple and schedules an informal VR session with the teens.
Demystifying the Technology
Human speech is magical. It is more complex and sophisticated than we intuitively understand. Linguists like Noam Chomsky have built a science of language, deriving not only the surface logic of words but the underlying processes in charge of thinking. Language is more than spoken information. Rather, it is a process of analyzing, communicating and empathizing with others in real time. Since humans think faster than they actually speak, spoken communication twists and bends as participants take turns listening and responding to each other in conversation.
In the near future, it is possible that most speech will be recorded, saved and parsed for meaning by artificial intelligence. Putting aside legitimate privacy concerns for the moment, the implications of having massive amounts of searchable data derived from our verbal communication is revolutionary. Already today, our email providers index written conversation to derive eerily targeted online advertising.