The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
‘Keeping one foot in the future’
When David Low, principal evangelist from Amazon, visited Waracle on Tuesday night to talk about why Amazon believes voice recognition technology like Alexa is the future of user experience, the fact more than 50 people came from digital industries all over Scotland indicated how important this growing sector is.
With Smartphone users flicking their way through about 30 apps in an average month, Waracle is certainly well-positioned to take advantage of the clamour for major institutions across banking, financial services and pharmaceuticals who are waking up to the digital reality and feel they have to out-source certain aspects of their digital offerings.
Waracle marketing director Sharon Dickie, formerly of NCR and originally from New Zealand, acknowledges that changing technologies will always lead to “scare stories” about automation and loss of jobs.
But as far as Waracle is concerned, the whole point of technology is about advancing humans’ ability to do things.
“The big fear about AI (artificial intelligence) and automation is loss of jobs,” said business development director David Romilly.
“It’s early enough to be experimental where we can hopefully see any problems with that further down the line.
“But the fact is people don’t want to be glued to screens. People are glued to screens because they have to be.
“If you can take that away and have services or things powered by something that’s more natural, then I see that as progress.
“People have fear of Terminator in their head where we’re going to have robots taking over the world. I think we are a long way from that. What strikes me is children using voice command technology today is natural.
“It’s so instinctive. This is the new way that the next generation will go about their daily lives. Voice recognition, weaved into peoples’ lives, has great potential to lever people away from being tied to technology with their heads down, so what better way than Waracle becoming experts.”