25 years ago, if you read a newspaper headline claiming that Australian army officers had been using headsets to control robot dogs via the power of telepathy from brainwaves inside the soldiers' skulls, you'd have assumed it was April 1st - or that the editor of the newspaper had been foraging for mushrooms that day and put the wrong ones in his breakfast omelet!
But the story, reported in the mainstream media internationally, is claimed to be accurate by the Ozzie army and a multitude of news outlets. You couldn't make it up, and such technological innovations are now indeed possible, if only with the advent of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Technology is advancing at such a rate that certain groups of people across society are complaining that life is becoming too complicated. It's true that to ride on a bus nowadays you're very likely to have to use your phone to buy a ticket or use its screen to replace a credit-card-sized piece of plastic in your wallet. Is that true progress? If the battery goes flat you may have to pay a penalty fare, and guess what, the bus company will probably fine you in cash and issue a paper receipt!
Phone apps and portable devices have now largely replaced cash or your house & car keys. You have access to tech that allows you to turn on your domestic heating from your self-driving car as you're being taken home. So it's no surprise that many people, often older generations, are struggling to come to terms with this brave new world of panoptic technocracy.
DAPs - a dab hand at digital adoption
Fortunately, help is at hand, from the increasing use of Digital Adoption Platforms or DAPs. DAPs are virtual teaching assistants that run alongside the primary software to which they're assigned. They use AI to help new users learn unfamiliar software, and indeed assist even experienced techies to come to terms with updates to existing platforms.
There may be readers old enough to remember Microsoft's 'Clippy' - a virtual assistant with an irritating habit of providing useless tooltips at the most inconvenient times:
"It looks like you're trying to write a letter, would you like to learn more about formatting indented text...?"
"No thanks Clippy, I'd rather throw this large and heavy computer out of my office window!"
The most annoying thing was that whether you were a first-time user of MS Word, or a seasoned professional writer, Clippy would offer advice via tooltips regardless of your experience level. MS Word couldn't possibly know who you were, nor could it assess your IT competence levels.
But the AI in a DAP can do just that. Whenever a user logs on to software for the first time, or encounters updates on an existing platform, the AI looks at the user's account and draws upon the person's usage history, their typical responses to changes and a list of instances where they ran into difficulty.
For example, imagine an accounts clerk working in a multinational corporation, whose job it is to input invoices and remittances into a data-entry screen. One day, something changes in their regular workflow, and despite 30 minutes training by the accounts manager and Human Resources (HR), the employee can't remember the formatting of the numerical amounts to be keyed into a given field.
Tooltips, spaces and commas
The clerk keeps trying to input $12,500.00 as just that, with a comma separating the figures 2 and 5; however the software simply demands a blank space as a thousands separator (i.e. $12 500.00). It rejects the operator's attempts to enter the figures. If the employee is working from home, they're going to have to seek help over the phone as to why the computer won't accept the figures as normal, or if in the office, the person will have to raise an IT support ticket.
But a DAP would note the first time that a user made the mistake of adding a comma into a restricted field; it would then offer a tooltip advising that operator of the need for a space instead. Furthermore, the AI would also proactively provide the same assistance the next time that screen was reached again by the same operator. Once the employee had learned, after a few more instances of input, that commas were not required in certain fields, the DAP would no longer prompt the operator with a tooltip.
Business intelligence for management
It's this sort of hyper-personalization that enables software help to be aptly directed and non-distracting. When platform updates occur, management can also assess from companywide user reports how many operators are struggling at a given point, thus informing the software designers to change certain aspects of the workflow requirement. Not only can DAPs be used to smooth workflow in large corporations, but they can also offer valuable intelligence on personnel performance for human resources departments (HR).
Let's not forget that DAPS don't have to be used in solely commercial applications. It won't be long before robot dogs will be telepathically controlled more efficiently via a soldier's use of a DAP, just as Grampa will be able to use his TV streaming service at last. But perhaps the most disturbing story about technological advancement recently (or the most exciting, depending on your outlook) is the report that a Chinese tech giant has successfully produced a brain / computer interface from a non-human primate to a machine. Will chimps soon be using DAPs to operate machinery in factories? It's a scary thought.
Whatever your opinion on such things, the message is clear - DAPs are the way of the future, and those who use them won't get dogged with dreary tech dilemmas!
