Voice for Marketing

Voice is set to become a necessity for driving site traffic and a ticket to increased conversion

Businesses that want to drive traffic to their site have had to learn how to optimize for search and then how to optimize for mobile. Now they are going to have another medium to consider: optimizing for voice search.

“Voice tech is on the rise and will continue to grow,” said Dan Drapeau, Head of Technology at Blue Fountain Media, in a phone interview. He compared its transition to mainstream connection to that of social media and mobile.

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Why Marketers Should Be Thinking About Voice

Tips for Aspiring Data Scientists

Kaggle graph

Data scientist ranks as the best job for 2019 in America on Glassdoor. With a median base salary of $108,000 and a job satisfaction rank of 4.3 out of 5, plus a fair number of openings predicted, that is not surprising. The question is: What does one have to do to get on track to qualify for this job?

To find out, we looked for the advice given to those who seek to get on this career track. Much comes down to the hard skills in coding and math. But that strong computation alone doesn’t cut it. Successful data scientists also need to be able to speak to business people on their own terms, which calls for the capabilities associated with soft skills and leadership.

Read more in 12 Key Tips for Learning Data Science

Gearing up for digital transformation

It’s the time of year when we’re gearing up for the spring forward (March 10). As we get set to advance our clocks, we should also be thinking about how we can advance our businesses on the road of digital transformation. That calls for making the necessary shifts in a technology portfolio to embrace the game changers, especially the ones that deliver on customer analytics.

Read more in Time to rebalance your technology portfolio for digital transformation

11 Takes on AI

Takeaway: The advance of AI is inevitable, and what that translates into for humanity is not altogether clear. Some believe we can look forward to a great future, while others think it means we are on the path to being supplanted by our robotic overlords. The third perspective is one that is aware of risks but considers them to be manageable.

We hear a lot about AI and its transformative potential. What that means for the future of humanity, however, is not altogether clear. Some futurists believe life will be improved, while others think it is under serious threat. There’s also a spectrum of positions in the middle. Here’s a range of takes from 11 experts.

Here's the first 

That is the first sentence in Yudkowsy’s 2002 report entitled “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). While the term AI wasn’t bandied about nearly as much then as it is now, there still remains a problem of a lack of understanding on the capabilities and limits of the technology. In fact, in the past couple of years, there’s been more of a push to make AI not just understandable, but explainable.

And we'll jump to the last one: “There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial Intelligent machine by 2035.” – Gray Scott

This quote is not mistyped, though it deviates from the way you will see it anywhere else online because it always appears as “There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.” Here’s the story. Based on how far back it appears in digital sources, it was likely said in 2015. However, I could not pin it down to any particular context even after hours of search through texts and videos from that period. So I contacted Scott himself to ask for the source. He admitted, “I do not recall when the first time was that I said this or where it was.” But he did recall his wording: “The quote has always been wrong. It should read ‘artificial Intelligent.’”

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To read the other nine, click on 11 Quotes About AI That'll Make You Think

eBook on AutoML

 AI can enable marketers to deliver on those expectations because it can anticipate not just what customers would want to hear about but when and how they’d want to receive that communication. “With AI, such personalization can now be achieved with previously unimaginable precision and at vast scale,” insists H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty. The company that does that for music is Pandora. Delivering personalized music selections involves “billions of data points that are tracked across dozens of systems, including media servers, device clients, and ad servers.” To keep all that running smoothly, it needs to detect and address anomalies as they occur. It’s a tall order that is answered with an ML system with the capability to do just that in near real-time, something Pandora will also draw on in assuring its ads are performing as expected.

Read more in my eBook: 2019: the year AutoML takes off

The essential partnership: CIO and CMO

As Henry David Thoreau said, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” The partnership allows the CMO to plan the castles in the air and work with the CIO to set up their foundations.

Read more in The CIO and CMO are natural partners: here's why

Related post: https://www.zylotech.com/blog/who-controls-the-marketing-stack-in-2019-the-cio-or-the-cmo

Wearables Pose Security Risks

Takeaway: Thanks to the advance of IoT, the market for wearables keeps expanding to the point that it should hit 50 billion devices by 2020. While these devices offer hands-free convenience for specific functions, they also introduce new points of vulnerability that can be opportunities for hackers.

Cisco predicted that by the year 2020, 50 billion new wearable devices will be connected through the IoT. This increases points of connection exponentially, and that translates into a huge opportunity for hackers.

Demonstrated Hacks

That wearable devices like Fitbits can be be manipulated through acoustic interference was demonstrated by a number of research experiments. It’s true that there are no immediate ramifications of a nefarious nature other than possibly gaming the count of one’s steps, but the researchers do warn of this: “For instance, should one trust the step count from a Fitbit as evidence for an alibi?” How can it be relied upon if it’s possible to inflate the number of steps through a hack?

This is a question of reliable accuracy, but sometimes it is the accuracy itself that poses a problem. Wearables might be picking up accurate information that is traced directly to the individual and so reveal quite a lot.

Read more in Hacking Wearable Tech: The Potential Danger of Advancing Wearable Technology