2016 will be the year of conversational commerce

I guess there's enough evidence to say that this is a trend the tech industry is moving toward. But is there any evidence for the assertion that we'll find it normal?

I'm reminded of the numerous false starts of virtual reality. We're now in the beginning of the virtual reality revolution... or.. we're in another false start. I'm even more skeptical that "conversational commerce" is something we'll want or like.

As far as it goes, I think this is true:

"Before I begin, I want to clarify that conversational commerce (as I see it) largely pertains to utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context."

But it is very early days for voice interfaces, and there are numerous problems that need to be overcome. What I wrote in "Amazon has no idea how to run an app store" amounts to a list of problems that Amazon needs to address before its Echo platform can take off. We've already discussed that on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409

But those issues are very specific to Echo. There are more general issues which the article doesn't get into. Although the author does seem to sense the potential:

"I mentioned this in my post last year, but we can now see that the voice-controlled hardware trojan horses from the big companies haven’t necessarily been embraced with open arms. Yet. I don’t have specific numbers, so I may be wrong, but my sense is that it’s still very early days for devices like Amazon’s Echo (which is being shrunk) or Google’s onHub."

In this next year, I expect 2 big trends:

1.) The threat of Amazon taking over this space is forcing other companies to open up -- in particular, Apple is going to do a lot to open up Siri and make it easier for developers to take advantage of the full power of Siri.

2.) developers will learn a lot about what this style of development actually requires. I wrote about one of my first insights in "Dialogue designers replace graphic designers when creating voice interfaces" http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/script-designers-repl... but I suspect there will be hundreds of similar blog posts, as more and more developers gain experience and insights regarding the unique demands made by voice interfaces.