Snippets: Influence of digital assistants on customer experiences

Believe it or not, the "behaviour" of digital assistants is also a factor for customers while making a choice for which one to go with. At least that is what the findings of a new research on the effects of inserting personality in chatbots and virtual assistants would like us to believe. The study which was shared by Haptik, which claims to be the world's largest conversational artificial intelligence platform, has revealed that urban English speakers overwhelmingly prefer virtual assistants that exhibit a friendly personality — rating them higher than more impersonal, purely "transactional" assistants when it comes to factors such as comfort level and efficiency while completing tasks.

Called "Virtual Assistant Personality Preference Among Urban English Speakers", it studied the influence of the digital assistants on customer experiences primarily across three domains -- likelihood of re-engagement, comfort levels and estimation of productivity and efficiency. Participants were nearly three times more likely to state that they would definitely want to interact with the friendly chatbot again, as compared to the transactional bot.

More dollars

According to Gartner, Inc., information security is one of the topmost priorities for companies as it forecasts them to increase spending on it by 12.4 per cent this year compared to the previous one. With this increase, enterprise information security spending in the country will touch $1.86 million in 2019, forecasts Gartner. Experts say within the information security umbrella, the segments to watch out will be cloud security which is expected to touch $4 million in 2019, again an increase of 300 per cent from 2018. 

"The Personal Data Protection bill which is likely to be accepted by the Indian parliament in 2019 and the Indian government's initiatives like Digital India and Smart City are increasing net-new adopters of cloud. In addition, Indian organisations are increasingly using cloud-specific security tools such as cloud access security broker solutions for threat prevention, data loss prevention and compliance requirements,” says Rustam Malik, principal research analyst at Gartner.