Androgamer

                            PREVIOUS CHAPTER Chapter 10 | From Data to Understanding Silicon Valley companies, with the likes of Google leading the charge. The clas- sic anecdote  that  symbolizes their  reliance on data is how Google ran an experiment  to  collect data on what shade of blue (out  of 41 candidates2) would be most appropriate for a button. A designer who left Google because of these types of behavior said it was an indication of the lack of appreciation of intuition and creativity, necessary preconditions for innovation in design.3 Data-driven AI techniques have only exasperated the issue and strengthened the argument of those who call for every decision to be data driven. A favor- ite statement to throw around in these data-obsessed times is that data is the new oil.4 It should be treated  as a commodity that an organization drills for, extracts, transforms,...

                              PREVIOUS CHAPTER Chapter 9 | Conversational Applications By 2018, people were  singing a different  tune. The impending takeover  of chatbots  did not quite go that way. Web sites were doing just fine, and so were applications on our phones. People had interacted enough with chatbots to realize that they were not that smart after all. Actually, quite a lot of chat- bots  where  ineffective and would trip  up at  the  slightest problem. What happened? Well, chatbot technology, like any other  technology, went through a natural cycle of maturity. The initial enthusiasm, necessary for  anything to  get any traction, met the harsh problems of the real world. People tried out different approaches because there  were  no established best  practices yet. Just like those web sites of the late 1990s and early ...

                       PREVIOUS CHAPTER Chapter 8 | Conversational Collaboration Platforms of the last few Telex machines in use. Nevertheless, it was my first experience of such a form of communication and I thought it was the coolest thing ever! It mixed the instant nature of voice calling without requiring synchronization between the participants as a voice call does. For an “Internetless” kid of the 80s, this was as close to magic as I could imagine. Of course, fax, e-mail, and now modern instant messaging applications have made the noisy Telex technology redundant. Telex, however, was the technol- ogy that proved the value of (almost) instant written communication in offices around the world for over 50 years. Nowadays, e-mail together  with messaging-based collaboration applications like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Facebook Workplace are an integral part of the digital work environment. In many wa...