COVID 19 and Voice

and Biometrics

Covid19-Voice-And-Biometrics
It’s Re-iterate the Digital Marketing Podcast



Hi everyone. Welcome back to reiterate. It’s being off the air for some months, as we looked at COVID. And I, re-imagined the way that I worked slightly, um, focusing on clients rather than this, which is my pitch project, although it is the thing I really enjoy. Um, I also didn’t want to start. Uh, giving opinions as to how I thought things could be or jump onto the covert bandwagon.



I thought it was more important to just do the work, see how things are going, and then give some ideas for where we possibly are going to be in the future. Because futurism is something I really, really enjoy. We’re about three months in four months and 200 days, a hundred days, whatever it might be. And around the world, things are opening up South Africa, not so much.



But we have a very different population and very different issues to deal with. What’s been interesting to note is how people have adapted and all the things that we have been talking about for probably two or three years longer, four or five years has come to fruition very quickly. It’s being very difficult for people to kick and scream when the only way that they can do business is online.



Insurance companies and insurance agents that used to love having coffee and meeting the clients and getting them to sign documents have changed their model. And I used to get lots of recruitment offers on LinkedIn. And now I get lots of insurance offers, short term, long term, all things in between, but it’s done in perhaps a different way than it was done.



Four or five months ago where it was really cold calling. This is more people that. Identify certain people and then reach out to them to see if they need to cover it. Um, it’s much more personal. It’s much more interesting, I think, um, to see the approach now, as opposed to the generic. Hi, how are you? Um, things that happened before, um, the other thing that’s relaxed of course is the way we communicate news companies are broadcasting from home.



They’re on noises in the background. They are children. There are birds, there are all sorts of things that. Make us more human. And this has been a very interesting thing for me as well. The company and the corporate culture exists in service, but thankfully it’s actually dropped in the way that we deal with each other.



There’s a lot more personality. I was chatting to one of my service providers. Who’s based in Chicago and in the middle of one of our meetings, he had to stop because there was a delivery for his wife. I think it came to the door. Could you imagine how that would have been upsetting a year ago? How unprofessional is that?



But you know what? It’s not it’s life. And I love the way that that has, has worked. A lot of people have struggled and a lot of people, once you get back to an office environment, um, there’s talk that it cycles creativity. There’s talk that it makes creativity better. There’s certainly, as we predicted with people working.



Remotely, there is the element of what does the middle manager for. And we might unpack that a bit more than some other episodes, but there’s also the, the notion or the obviousness that if you’re not doing your job, you don’t show up online. If you don’t show up online and then questions get asked really quickly sitting in an office all day, nine hours a day, you’re there.



And maybe the question around what you’re doing, isn’t. As stringent as it might be working online, I was a blurred, people are working longer hours. People are working different hours. I think the commitment is there from those who want to commit and we’ll see what happens to those you haven’t when we can have the meetings we need to have and the HR discussions that we need to have in the coming months, I’m not sure that I would like to be in their shoes, but from a day to day, Living arrangement and working arrangement.



And then, and just going about your life, something that’s I think we’ve spoken about with voice activation with AI and how these, uh, technologies work together. Um, I think there’s going to be a change in the way that we interact interacting online is one thing that a lot more e-commerce has happening.



But we still have to tap and go. We still have to punch in cards. We still use touchscreens at HTMS, um, in certain supermarkets and certain stores to do things. And I think that’s going to go nothing, touch screens all the way forward. And we have the technology in place now where biometrics facial recognition, things like that might be the way forward, ATM in store transactions.



Use the tickets already. They had some bit of NGO devices. There is a database of it somewhere. And I think this will be used. There’s some scary connotations to that as well, but there’s also the, the reaction to the touching, the social distancing. The surfaces that touch screens have provided great service in the past.



And we couldn’t have done without them, but we can move on and we can use voice to do everything else that we do. Anyone who uses Google will know that if you’re using the video service Hangouts, you can turn on, um, the caption maker and it pretty much delivers word for word in real time. What you were saying.



That you can save from your meeting. Not all the words are perfect and they might struggle with punctuation, but it’s certainly something that is very usable. And we know from our hands that’s Siri, et cetera, that’s where we can pretty much ask for anything we like using our voice. So I see biometrics replacing a touch pads and depending numbers.



We don’t need to remember them, which is fantastic. And I see voice commands changing other. Um, areas the difficulty here will be, how do we realize a transaction on an ATM, for example, when perhaps you aren’t comfortable talking about the transaction that you need to do, maybe they become rooms. Maybe HTMS, don’t literally transact because everything is available online.



There’s an online banking service. And you can do that in the privacy of your own home or on your own device where touchscreen is still something you can use. Um, I think that this leads to the future, and I think we spoke about this and one of the episodes where the redundancy of certain things that we take for granted might be there.



Um, no screen. Why do we need a screen? If it’s not a touch screen, or we need a screen to see the other person. And I’m sure during this lockdown period, you’ve noticed how difficult it is. To interact and to read a room when people have got the video will notice to anyone who attends to the video of please don’t it’s makes decisions very difficult.



But if you don’t need a screen to do touch screen, then you don’t need a screen on your device. If it becomes a voice activated device, you need a television of some kind of display and that can project anything to anywhere. So maybe your device can project to your smart TV. Maybe it protects your Apple TV at the moment.



I’m sure most of you use that and maybe walls become screens. Um, and our devices become the interface, um, back to the idea of terminals where things live in the cloud. So Cobra is going to push a lot of this tick, where we don’t need the physicality of devices. And I can’t remember which episode we spoke about the idea of the best kind of phone is no phone.



And everything’s stored up in the cloud. This might come to be a reality a lot sooner than we thought it would be. I live in South Africa and I don’t have the world’s best internet connection. That’s just not quick enough, but most services work fine. Video works fine. All the checks services work fine data from a large document perspective may take a little while to upload, but not, not a heck of a lot.



It’s, it’s workable. COVID-19 changed the game in many ways. It’s certainly going to where you’re going to change the way that we use tech. And it’s certainly going to push and force us into using this tech in much the same way. It’s forced us into our home offices, into all of the things that we now seem to take for granted.



Um, it’s going to push the tick there as well. So I would suggest reevaluating your touch screen interfaces. Um, if you, if you have apps, think about how they could work from a voice command. Um, perspective and investigate biometrics as opposed to pin numbers and things like that to do identification. I can’t wait for that myself.



Although the, um, doomsday profits will tell you that using our biometrics, it’s probably not a good thing for our personal privacy. It’s certainly a good thing from a COVID-19 perspective going forward. That’s it for today. I hope you found this interesting. Think about the way you’re going to use tech and I’m hoping to get on some industry experts in the next couple of weeks to see how they are coping, what’s changed and what they look forward to in the next coming months.



Have a great day and we’ll talk again soon.