A new app from Yahoo is trying to contextualize our mobile phones. Aviate is a new home screen for Android phones that over time learns the apps most often used and categorizes along with other similar apps. For example there is a social category that lists all social media apps and it reconfigures the category depending on which apps are used most often.
Some of the examples of true contextualization that we will see very soon in our phones could be that our phones put themselves on silent when we go to the cinema or attend an important meeting or automatically start tracking our runs without us having to launch an app.
Aviate is trying to introduce an element of this type of contextualization, but it is still early days. For example, the home screen launches a music app whenever the headphones are plugged in and has a quick swipe up menu with a user’s favourite contacts without them having to go into the phone app to find it three or four screens deep.
Other companies like Expect Labs, which has investors like Google, are trying to make voice search the default contextualization tool for websites and apps. So apps will understand a user’s requirement and the context of what they are trying to do and open voice search to make it easier to input a search request. For example, if a user is cycling and wants to search for something without stopping and taking their phone out of their pockets, the phone can recognize that a user is cycling and open an app that works with voice search such as Google Now and reply using voice to read out the results.
This is the future of how we interact with our phones and how contextualization can make interacting with technology much better. It will depend though on how comfortable users are with sharing large amounts of data with companies and apps for them to work properly and provide a great user experience.
SmartFocus is running an interactive webinar all about contextual messaging on Tuesday May 19 at 4pm. If you would like to know how to make your marketing more contextualized to increase sales and drive revenue, click here to register for this event. Hurry, places are limited.