Four Breakthrough innovations of Artificial Intelligence in Virtual events!!!
In the past two years, Virtual meetings have come as a lifesaver for the technology industry. The virtual events segment which comprises virtual meetings for training, communication, sales & marketing, recruitment, etc. is poised to register a growth of about 20% CAGR from 2022 to 2030 (source).
The applications of these virtual meetings are endless and the meetings are being tried in education, healthcare, e-sports, promotional events, etc. The technology is adopted at a rapid pace and is expected to boom in the coming times. Currently, the space is dominated by the giants such as Google Meet, Hangouts, Microsoft teams & Webex, Zoom, etc. There are a lot of other players who are also catering in this sector and serving a particular group of individuals and businesses.
Issues faced by the Virtual meeting industry
The virtual event industry struggles with five major pain points:
- Privacy Issues
- Information loss
- Low User Engagement
- Stability and Connectivity Issues
- Interoperatability
More or less, the entire field is struggling with these issues and hampering the growth of the industry. The next set of innovations in the coming years would be focused on these aspects and would try to solve any one or multiple of these points. If you are a developer working in the virtual event space, you should be worried about these points because targeting them would influence the user experience and also the adoption.
Impacts that AI can bring in the domain for each of the above points
Privacy
Privacy is the first thing that comes to mind whenever one talks about online presence and any virtual platform. It is indeed the first focus of any user. In recent times, multiple viral videos depicted how hackers got into virtual meetings and created a ruckus.
AI can be a game changer here. An integrated AI system can track the spread of event invite and flag everytime the access is shared with someone who is not an intended participant. It can use IP address, authentication systems, trust and previous interaction history of the users, and various other factors to decide if any participant is a valid participant or not. In events when a participant seems to be invalid, the system can flag the organizer to check and validate the entry of the participant.
The AI systems can also control the data sharing in the platform and prevent users to access the restricted data. The best part is that AI can continuously monitor and flag whenever it spots an anomaly in the behaviour of any user.
The advanced AI systems would be able to screen users from abusive online predators. It would be a need for students and corporate meetings.
Information loss
The virtual meetings have been struggling with information loss. The majority of participants get distracted and end up losing critical discussion points. Sometimes it happens due to issues with the network or due to the complexity of the subject matter.
The industry is targeting it by using a summary of discussions that are shared with all the participants. But this summary of the discussion is generated by individuals and is a time-consuming process. The points are influenced by the individual’s capacity for information retention and also create additional work for that individual.
For critical meetings, the meetings are recorded and referred to at later stages. Still, the majority of participants don’t visit it due to lack of time.
Artificial intelligence is the solution here. The linguistic capabilities of AI are beyond imagination and are improving day by day. Very soon we would be looking at meetings where AI would note the points and screen the points to filter out the important parts of the meeting. These points would be shared with the participants.
Since each participant carries a different interest in the domain and has different priorities for various topics, the AI would filter the information as per personal choices. But such kind of filtering would require highly complex machine learning skills and user interaction history. It’s a long way to go to that skill but Google is already heading that way. The live translation, and transcribe features could soon be part of their meetings and solve a lot of note-making hassles for the individuals.
Low user engagement
This is a serious issue. Though the industry is researching virtual reality and augmented reality to tackle this. Some researchers believe that artificial intelligence can also help in this issue.
The control of visuals, and audio based on a person’s psychological behaviour can be a breakthrough. Each person responds to information differently. Some are more careful towards growth and some become aware whenever they spot a negative word.
Such personal interactions can be spotted by the AI and thus the AI would automatically tweak the visuals and audio of various participants based on their inclinations. The personal data of such preferences would be stored in the local systems with a high level of encryption. Moreover, the organizers can be made aware of the choice of visuals/ audio that can capture the attention of their audience.
Similar techniques are currently being adopted by various SEO models which inform the content creators of the impact of their headlines.
Stability and Connectivity Issues
The internet connectivity sucks for certain places and attending virtual events at those locations is a horrible experience. Researchers are already working on optimizing the applications and the applications are quite stable now.
But AI is also entering here. The next generation of virtual meeting platforms would be able to identify and switch to various types of settings. These could be multiple levels of the same platform. Each level would have different settings for creating a good user experience. Such systems would automatically switch to audio, static visuals, and high-quality dynamic visuals based on bandwidth availability. Moreover, the content that is lost would be recorded and stored for the participants.
Also, these systems would give the participants a basic idea of what they have missed and the context of the current discussion by using infographics, focused keywords, trends, etc. This would be a truly phenomenal experience with AI.
Interoperatability — Where AI is not yet visioned
This is the final points and probably the last that would be adopted by developers. It attacks the monopoly and USP of any developer and that’s why they are reluctant to work on it.
But the issue is very critical. There are dozens of apps that are currently being used by millions of users. Whenever an event is scheduled in one application, the users who have access to the application can attend it. It is scary at times because the application adoption is different for different locations and different populations. There is a high need for interoperatability so that users can attend the meetings even when they don’t have the application installed on their phones.
To target it, the popular applications are already providing hyperlinks that can be used to download their applications, attend the meetings via browsers, or use temporary applications to attend these meetings. Having interoperatability with basic functions would not only give the benefit of attending meetings but also give enough flexibility to the developers to influence users to join their native apps.
An example of such experience is the imessage and general SMS. Apple let you send message to non-iPhone users via their native iMessage app but creates a minor difference that inspires people to join iMessage and eventually buy iPhones. Such a model could be revolutionary in the virtual meet-up environment.
The domain is seeing a lot of innovation and a high fraction of these innovations are in the direction of using Artificial intelligence to improvise virtual meeting platforms. Let us wait for the revolutionary next generation of virtual meetings!!!
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I write about technology, innovation, the future, life, religion, AI, upcoming changes, and the impacts of various events in the current world.
