SOS: how to solve digibesitas

Smartphones and other new technologies are changing enormously fast, it’s almost a full-time job keeping up with the latest trends. Smartphones are becoming more and more crucial to our lives. We are slowly getting into the area of the internet of things, which means that different objects are linked to the internet and to our smartphone. Examples of applications on the internet of things are smart parkings, smart trash cans, smart washing machines, etc. Linking these objects to the internet makes them smart, an empty parking spot can give you a notification if it’s empty or a litterbox when it’s full. The internet of things is still evolving, here in Belgium it’s more something theoretical than practical, although it’s probably only a matter of time. But even without the internet of things we are highly dependent on our smartphone, we use it for photos, for payments, for getting in touch with family and friends, for finding our way and many more. The internet of things will probably increase our dependency, you will need your smartphone for everything. But more voices are already complaining about this dependency, myself included. People are becoming consciousness of the time they spend on their phone, always checking notifications, scrolling through social media and often losing time.

But as I said, technology changes super fast and scientists are already trying to find a solution for this so called “digibesitas struggle”. We’ve known Siri from Apple for a few years but now other companies are also developing their own intelligent personal assistants who operate on speak communication. Google has ‘Hello Google’, Amazon introduced Echo with ‘Alexa’, but Windows Certana and Samsung Bixby are also examples of intelligent assistants. This speech-oriented technology may be the perfect solution: these personal assistants make it possible to get us away from our interface, our screen, and gives us the possibility to multitask, but don’t exclude the smartphone.

When google presented it’s “Hello google”, the audience immediately tested the application, resulting in echoes of “Sorry I could not understand you, can you repeat it again?” Yes, this technology is not perfectly developed, with only little noise your personal assistant turns out to be useless. Luckily another feature of this technology revolution is that the competition between big companies is damming. This unhealthy competition has lots of negative components but a good one is that it stimulates technology progress, and in this case the progress of a personal assistant who will help us “rehab” from our digibesitas.