The
Potential
Impact of
Intelligent Personal Assistants
On the
Wine Industry
Part 1
The advancement of technology is happening in such a way that intelligent machines are capable of assisting humans in various activities. IPA or Intelligent Personal Assistant is an artificial intelligence and robotics based application that can assists humans in managing their daily chores, specialized tasks and so on. The primary goal of an IPA is to reduce the workload from a human user so that the user can have more productive time for other tasks. These applications are there to make life easier in today’s competitive world. Some common examples of IPA are task scheduler, reminder setting, searching data, calling, sending messages and so on. There are applications like Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, etc. that are mobile based personal assistants (O’Leary, 2013). In this report, a special case of application and impacts of using IPAs in wine industry will be covered.
An IPA can follow any of the three approaches to assist a human user. Firstly, it can perform a task on behalf of the user and the user don’t need to participate in the task at all. Secondly, an IPA and its user can perform a task together. And thirdly, a user can set an IPA to do routine tasks for the user. Hence, some level of collaboration and communication with the user is necessary for an IPA. However, IPAs can dynamically perform a task in comparison to a pre-programmed application that does not take the environment into the consideration (Pirani, Bhinderwala, Shukla, & Cherarajan, 2014).
Users can control an IPA with voice based instructions, text, graphics, gesture based instructions and so on. The complexity of the IPAs depend on the functionalities and interfaces with the user. Voice based IPAs are more popular than the other types of IPAs. Some notable examples are Siri, Google Now and so on (Pirani et al., 2014).
On a mobile device, an IPA utilizes the microphone, camera, and other hardware components like fingerprint sensor and so on. Other than that, it may access other applications like Contacts, SMS, social media accounts etc. to understand a user and deliver personalized solution to the users. Usually, such applications are implemented on a suitable cloud computing platform and requires connectivity between the user and the cloud platform though the Internet.
Wine industry is a large one. There are multiple areas where IPAs can be introduced in the industry. From harvesting grapes to prepare wine, supplying the same in the market, and finally to the consumer is a long process. On the other hand, wine is an exotic drink, it needs to be knowledgeable and have information about restaurant and fine dining, drinks etc. to assist someone in selecting a good wine (Mozell & Thach,...