While Singapore and the rest of the world are going through some social distancing measures, it is likely such measures will stay longer (medium terms) as sprouts of infections continue due to its asymptomatic nature. The world’s medical research bodies are trying their best to develop a vaccine that would take the world back to normalcy. Not scaring anyone reading this, but I didn’t delve deeper into reinfection or virus mutation, those topics would be for the medical experts.
As technology helps better our lives in these crucial times, we explore the effects of the 5 areas which enhance our lives in these challenging times.
These are 5 areas of technology to make our lives easier.
With the social distancing measures, employers, employees, students, friends, partners and parties are using video/voice conferences to communicate, update, discuss, engage and enjoy each others’ company. As usage grows exponentially, nuisance situations of hacking (i.e. Zoom-bombing) has taken users aback, Affected companies are trying to fix those security issues.
In the age of COVID19 infection tracking, a lot of governments and universities are providing many informative dashboards to keep us aware of developing situations. Data analytics and visualization technology are used to keep these information clear and reduce the data conflicts. With such detailed information, it helps keep the general population informed and stop the spread of misinformation.
Contact Tracing is a necessity to ensure the spread of the virus is contain. With the recent announcement by Apple & Google (Link). New ‘Contact Tracing’ software will be deployed to your mobile devices that would make it easier to track down people who may have been infected by COVID19 carriers.
The technology works by harnessing short-range Bluetooth signals. It would gather a record of each other's phones which came into close proximity. Singapore has also launched the TraceTogether app in March 2020. However, the scale of Apple & Google technology would enable billions to benefit from it.
With websites serving up as shopfronts, user experience (UX) is critical towards increasing user interest and stickiness. These chatbots with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, lessen the need for face-to-face interactions or having centralised call centres. Instead of housing these resources together (Safe Distancing red-flag), using Chatbots would allow knowledge workers to help train these AI model (i.e. Named Entity Recognition/NER), serve up their knowledge online and solve issues. These chatbots with assisted guidance, will smoothen user engagement, reduce waiting and increase information sharing.
While many use teleconferences, it’s quite normal for people to zoom in & out of focus onto other pressing needs/issues. Through Technology like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Meeting notes would allow these calls to be kept for offline consumption or as reference documentation. These meeting notes can be further processed to create meeting minutes, through a variety of AI technologies (keywords, auto-punctuation, inverse text normalization).
ASIA Technology Ventures helps businesses understand their needs & evolve their traditional processes through Digital Transformation solutions and services.
About the author
Stephen Chan is the founder of ASIA Technology Ventures. As a creative and entrepreneurial thinker with deep knowledge in both business and technology, he has accomplished more than 2 decades of high-growth businesses, developed revolutionary Go-To-Market strategies, led & built teams across Asia Pacific. He also has strong understanding of technology like SaaS/Cloud infrastructure, mobile apps, developer tools, blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc. Asia Technology Ventures was founded to help Asia's businesses transform, scale and compete beyond their comfort zone.
This is driven by his personal belief that "Success is a journey, not a destination", in-line with his pursuit of helping others as the foundation for true, happy, and meaningful living.
