2018 was an exciting year for the field of technology. Building on the successes and failures of 2017, companies threw their weight behind digital security and encryption.The advent of the smartphone and other mobile devices have revolutionized not just how we interact with technology but how we interact with the world around us.
Many predictions were made about how information technology would transform in 2018. But as you might expect, such predictions should always be taken with a pinch of salt. There are always surprises around the corner, especially in the field of technology, and there are also times when technology does not move as quickly as one would expect.
Here are a few things that were believed to trend in 2018, and what really happened.
At the start of 2018, drawing on a lot of evolution in 2017, many tech experts believed that 2018 would be the year the AI would begin to accelerate. It certainly has been an interesting year for AI, but there hasn’t been quite the huge boom that some tech heads believed there would be.
“A lot of new artificial intelligence tech has been devoted to analysis and automation,” says Cheryl N Hauer, regular contributor to researchpapersuk.com and lastminutewriting.com, “Though it was a whirlwind of year for data analysis, with some very high profile news stories putting data security at the center of the public view, how AI interacts with our movements online continues to evolve.”
Through advanced data exchange when browsing, AI transforms what we see online, in terms of adverts, suggested content and recommendations.
Though this has primarily been useful for marketing and sales conversion, we are starting to see a greater amount of independent users such as bloggers and freelance writers utilize AI to extend their reach. The uses and abuses of AI in data analysis may have brought widespread concern amongst the public, but it has also opened it up to a wider field of users as a result.
Chatbots
Another way that AI has evolved further is the increasing intelligence of chatbots. Using automated machine learning, chatbots learn through experience, meaning that the interactions we have with them improve each and every time we encounter them. Only a few years ago, the rudimentary AI chatbots or automated twitter accounts seemed absurd and often nonsensical.
But in 2018, artificially intelligent advisors consolidated their place as useful tools in customer service. At the beginning of the year, there were already clear signs that chatbots would become an important utility. Many predicted a meteoric rise in interactions with chatbots. Whilst we are not quite at a world-shaking percentage yet, our encounters with chatbots are increasingly natural and flowing.
Voice Interactive Software
One of the big movements in AI over the past couple of years has been voice interactive software. Alexa and Siri have continued to make their way into many homes, and voice command technology has become commonplace. One of the biggest events over the past year has been the unveiling of Google Duplex.
Social Media and Video Marketing
2018 may just have been the year to push social media and internet-based video content over to the most accepted platform for marketing and advertising. The world of marketing has been remarkably slow to pick up on the usefulness and cost-efficiency of internet based marketing. Many would have predicted years ago that internet advertising would have superseded TV advertising by now, and it is somewhat surprising it has not.
