AI shop assistants: get ready for a world where you can’t tell humans and chatbots apart
I regularly fly with KLM from Minneapolis to New Delhi, and always stop over in Amsterdam. I am frequently in Minneapolis for research and this is my route to go home to take a break from work. I have done the journey so many times that I know almost all the shops at Schiphol inside out. However, one time in summer 2019, the predictability was broken when I missed my connecting flight to New Delhi.
I was tired, hungry, sleepy, and the customer-service counter was closed. I had the choice to make the long walk to customer services at the next gate or use my iPhone, so I tried my phone.
I texted the KLM WhatsApp number and went back and forth with an assistant on my choices. Within minutes I was on the next flight, with the boarding pass on my phone. It was only later that I discovered that I had been dealing with next-generation artificial intelligence – in an example of the new field of conversational commerce.
If you haven’t encountered it yet, you will soon. Certain supermarkets are providing voice-enabled shopping services to customers, for example. In the US, Walmart shoppers can ask Google Assistant to add certain things to their virtual shopping trolleys and to learn from their shopping habits.
Google has similar deals with two other supermarket giants – Target in the US and Carrefour in France – while Amazon provides voice-enabled shopping in the UK to online customers of Ocado. Not to be outdone, Walmart recently bought conversation-commerce specialist Botmock to expand its services in this area.
There are already more than a billion people interacting with businesses via either text or voice-based conversational tools. In 2021, conversational commerce is expected to account for total sales of US$41 billion (£30 billion) worldwide, and is forecast to grow five-fold to nearly US$300 billion by 2025 – half of it from chatbots. So how is this market developing, and what does it mean for our shopping habits?
Coffee diehards and hyper-personal shopping
If conversational commerce still feels under the radar, one reason is that most growth has been in China, Japan and South Korea. All the same, it is cropping up everywhere. If you are talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend on Facebook and suddenly want to send them flowers, you don’t even have to break the conversation. You click on 1-800-Flowers.com, a conversational AI tool integrated with Messenger, and explain what you want. You don’t even need to enter card details if you use Apple, Samsung or Google Pay.
Or maybe like me you are a die-hard coffee lover. I used to stand in a queue to get my morning latte, but not now. I just order from my couch from the chatbot on the My Starbucks Barista app, and my coffee is waiting when I reach my local store.
The AI underpinning these advances encompass are deep learning, sophisticated natural language-processing, voice recognition, and cognitive computing – which is a system for machine-thinking that emulates human thought. But the big selling point – besides ease, comfort and shopping anywhere at any time – is probably the potential to make a customer’s retail experience much more personal.
If it lives up to expectations, customers might soon be able to interact with an AI who understands what they want in specific detail. We already see big retailers offering personalised products to attract customers – for example Nike and Adidas allowing people to design their own trainers.
But by using sophisticated AI, personalisation can move to a whole new level. Customers will receive personalised recommendations in their own language, easing the burden of choice and making the experience as enjoyable as possible. They might spend more money as a result – not because they are being manipulated, but because they almost feel like they are buying from a friend.
Meanwhile, businesses will gain new insights into people’s shopping behaviour. Yes this raises privacy questions, but it will also help businesses to refine their offering. This should reduce returns and increase sales.
Where it’s heading
Conversational commerce reminds me of the 2013 movie Her, set in a near future where Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha (Scarlet Johannson), an AI-based virtual assistant. The relationship eventually becomes unworkable when it emerges that Samantha is simultaneously having intimate friendships with thousands of men. She then combines with other AIs to perform an upgrade that leads to them withdrawing from human interaction.
We may be some way from falling in love with chatbots, but clearly there are questions about ethics here. The technology must not harm humans or pose any threat to their dignity. For instance, Microsoft recently restricted its voice mimicry technology because it makes it easier to create deep-fake videos.
Another issue is jobs. Automation is clearly a threat to the workforce, and conversational commerce could well be part of that. But unfortunately, businesses will not pay for so many support staff if AI can do the job at least as well. One consolation is that AI in its entirety might create more jobs than it destroys. For instance, the World Economic Forum predicted in 2018 that the net new jobs created by AI would be 58 million by 2022.
Looking further ahead, conversational commerce could become all the more prevalent in the metaverse, the virtual reality representation of the internet, with voice-enabled shopping potentially accounting for 30 per cent of all ecommerce revenues by 2030. It seems foreseeable that we will be interacting with AI avatars in virtual reality stores, or talking to bots in real-life supermarket aisles via augmented reality glasses.
What may seem alien to our generation is likely to be second nature to the shoppers of tomorrow. There are pros and cons to this technology, but I suspect my little chat with the KLM chatbot at Schipol airport will soon seem quaint compared to what comes next.
Shweta Singh, Assistant Professor, Information Systems and Management, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Blueprint for an uncertain world
Guus Franke, founder of Axiom Partners, reveals a free-thinking strategy that could prove resilient in the current climate
For most observers, the current environment might not seem the ideal time to be executing deals and building investment portfolios. But Guus Franke, founder of Axiom Partners, is feeling ebullient about prospects for transactions in the months ahead.
Franke should have plenty of reason to be cheerful. His firm combines a thriving M&A advisory boutique with a private equity business that has rapidly grown in the last three years to reach a Euro 1 billion turnover across its portfolio companies.
But the Dutchman’s positive mindset is mainly driven by confidence in Axiom’s flexible investment style. It’s an approach he believes is well placed to address the complex nature of the Covid tail that still threatens to undermine investor appetite.
“In a five-year cycle you flip a coin and hope for the best”, says Franke. “But we’re thinking anti-cycle. We don’t believe in five-year investment periods. We want to be free, so we have no set ending for investments. We don’t know when we will exit, or even if at all.”
So far, investors comprising asset managers, banks and family offices have been rewarded for their backing of the firm. EBITDA for the last year at Dutch recruiter De staffing Groep (DSG), Axiom’s largest investment in 2021, was up 25 per cent year on year.
The acquisition of the Euro 400m turnover group is planned to be the first step in a buy and build strategy in the recruitment industry. Another recent purchase was credit management firm Cannock Chase EDR, which is intended to kickstart a series of bolt-ons across the financial sector.
What sets Axiom’s strategy apart from peers is a keenness to acquire businesses that are complimentary, rather than occupying the same ground, unlike the financial engineering model many PE houses are driven by.
This way, Franke is seeking value creation through expansion, rather than cutting out vast amounts of duplication. Although he accepts with any transaction there will inevitably be a degree of overlap and therefore some rationalisation, he insists the approach is very much focused on top line growth.
“We’ve explained to our companies that we are going to grow and with the team of specialists we have on board we’re going to help you grow,” he says.
Underpinning the strategy for delivering successful transactions and building long term value across the portfolio is a sharp focus on people in organisations.
Franke says this ethos begins with understanding the emotional instincts of employees of investee companies, who may have concerns about their future, especially if their company is the subject of a merger.
Franke says this thinking offers a divergence from a lot of mainstream corporate culture where “the same DNA exists across asset managers, VC firms or the big consultancies.”
“If you have the same DNA you think along the same lines, for example thinking in the same way about risk mitigation”.
Franke believes alternative thinking may be key to achieving fast and effective decision-making as investors and corporates scramble for solutions in response to the Covid environment. “A mingling of different DNAs can make us far more effective,” he says.
“We are still focused on risk mitigation, but the breadth of people we have brought into the firm means there is plenty scope for developing human capital and for entrepreneurial thinking,” says Franke.
He believes the firm’s focus on both financial and non-financial information can deliver powerful insights, not just for executing transactions, but also for building strong corporate cultures for the future.
“If the people in the businesses are not committed in the long term, how will those companies thrive? “We take a deep dive into the human aspects of a business. We ask: What do people want? Can we change as a business or are we not able to?” says Franke.
Paying attention to the people aspects of businesses can reap significant returns for a firm like Axion which employs 4,000 staff across its portfolio companies, says Franke. At DSG a people-centric approach to addressing the Covid challenge included improvements to home working environments and laying on a huge car-based party for staff and families.
“The focus on people is one of the value drivers of the firm, alongside building brands and reputation” says Franke, who is actively seeking to acquire more large companies while encouraging another cohort of investors to back his model.
INDUSTRY VIEW BY AXIOM PARTNERS
The big challenges for supply chains in 2022
In the run-up to Christmas, there was considerable anxiety about shortages of festive food and gifts. Trade friction was already at the core of the Brexit debate, and supply chain issues have been made much worse by the Covid-19 pandemic.
For example, a computer chip shortage had a knock-on effect across many industries. Concerns have also been raised about everything from lithium supply for electric vehicle batteries to restaurant food supplies to even coffee shortages.
Never has the issue of supply chain management been so prominent. The question now is what challenges supply chains face in the year ahead. So what can we expect?
Complex, fragmented, under pressure
Products reach consumers through a chain of companies involved, which typically includes manufacturers, logistics firms – who provide storage, distribution and transport – and retailers. Not surprisingly, the whole system is highly complex.
There’s a whole philosophy of contemporary supply chain management (SCM) concerned with making supply chains much more integrated than they used to be. Done well, it can significantly improve the overall performance of companies, as well as benefiting the economy and society. Yet this long-term effort to make the whole system more efficient has been set back by a whole host of challenges in global supply chains.
Three big issues became particularly apparent in 2021. First, and probably the most obvious to many of us, was the unprecedented pressures on global supply chains created by the Covid pandemic and the subsequent series of lockdowns and restrictions which varied in their timing and severity from country to country.
This has resulted in significant geographical shifts in supply and demand, which in turn has created problems for finely tuned global supply chains. Trends that were apparent pre-pandemic, such as increases in online shopping and driver and other skill shortages, are now causing real problems.
Second, the economic and business environment became more challenging. For example, in the UK and the rest of Europe, supply chain pressures were caused by Brexit as a result of increases in red tape and cross-border checks. More widely, firms continue to grapple with a range of international business challenges ranging from fluctuating exchange rates to the building of global management teams.
This all matters because business has become increasingly international – often global – in recent years. This is thanks to the reduction of traditional barriers to the cross-border movement of products, services, capital, people and information. The impact of this change on logistics and SCM is the subject of my book Global Logistics: New Directions in Supply Chain Management.
Third, the environmental impact of logistics and supply chain activities is beginning to be more widely understood. If countries around the world are to meet their emissions targets and commitments, it is key that they develop more sustainable supply chain practices. Glasgow’s COP26 in November had a strong focus on transport including freight and logistics. Business as usual is simply no longer an option if a sustainable future is to be achieved.
But uncertainty is a characteristic of the international business landscape in which supply chains operate. As a result, major companies have become strongly focused on supply chain risk management. This means identifying where risks of any kind exist in the network, assessing the potential impact of these risks, and putting mitigation strategies into place. A range of formal methodologies and tools have been developed to support this process.
The big question is how all this complexity can be handled, particularly in terms of design, planning and execution. These challenges are new in many respects, so past experience cannot be relied upon to generate solutions.
An unpredicatable world
So what kinds of things are going to affect global supply chains in 2022? As The Economist neatly put it recently, “the era of predictable unpredictability is not going away”.
The arrival of omicron has provided a timely reminder of the unpredictability of the pandemic. The emergence of new variants during 2022 could accentuate some of the current pressures. In this context, China’s continuing zero-Covid strategy with its tight border restrictions could create problems.
Despite some easing in recent months, international shipping costs are likely to remain high in 2022. Closer to home, the arrival of the full post-Brexit customs checks introduced on January 1 has introduced further friction and added costs, with many firms reporting a worrying lack of preparedness.
Above all, freight transportation and supply chain processes will continue to change during 2022 as more environmentally sustainable practices are adopted. These practices affect everything from transport vehicles, such as switching to electric delivery vans, through to changes in the wider supply chain, such as relocating distribution centres to minimise distances travelled.
Industry and academia are collaborating to develop innovative and sustainable practices, as can be seen in the work of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, for example. The year ahead will be key in the adoption of these practices, each of which requires change in the operational practices of firms. Such change will inevitably create short-term challenges as the new practices become embedded.
Business has to be resilient and capable of adapting to major disruptions so that it can develop long-term strategies and solutions to these complex challenges. In the meantime, shoppers are likely to see higher prices, with companies passing on increased shipping and other logistics costs to customers. We may continue to notice things missing from our supermarket shelves – new year product shortages are already being reported in some countries. So as consumers, we are going to have to keep being a bit more resilient ourselves.
Edward Sweeney, Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Heriot-Watt University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Visibility and control: the key to success for any digital transformation initiative
How an enterprise architect can help you align strategy, IT and your business
As a business decision-maker, you know that it’s critical that your digital change initiative significantly shifts the dial in your organisation. At the same time, you’re facing two key challenges: deciding how to drive this shift, and doing it with minimal risk and maximum return. Your credibility relies on your ability to plan and execute your approach.
Driving this digital change encompasses your entire organisation. From people, processes and technology to behaviours, culture and your fundamental customer interactions, all aspects must be taken into account, and aligned and executed with precision. Without this, you won’t meet your ambitions. Process will change, technology will be introduced, but the dial stays where it is.
To drive this change, you need a team. A team that encompasses many change experts: analysts who understand your market and services; change managers who can persuade and shift the business operation; and designers who determine your new processes and underlying technical infrastructure.
This team will provide you with the knowledge and ability to plan and execute your vision. However, you’re still missing one key ingredient, one that brings these disparate change experts together: your enterprise architecture team. It’s this team that provides the glue, keeping things aligned so that all of these changes result in significantly shifting the dial. This team plays the role of devil’s advocate and keeps your direction and execution in alignment.
What is enterprise architecture?
Simply put, “enterprise architecture” is an alignment of what the business wants to do now and in the future, and how this is enabled by technology.
Most successful enterprise architecture teams take care of specific aspects, some being more business-focused and others more oriented towards technology. Together, they span the entire enterprise. In general, most teams take care of the development of four “architectures”: business, technology, applications, and data.
The most pertinent of these architectures for an organisation’s decision-makers is business architecture. In simple terms, this architecture describes how your organisation generates revenue by providing insight into its value streams. It takes the business strategy and maps it against processes. This architecture also identifies opportunities for innovation and deals with governance and standards.
Why do you need to partner with an enterprise architect?
Enterprise architects use a modern tool, such as BiZZdesign HoriZZon, to design and model the different architectures. Architects typically create something called a capability map that aligns IT to the business strategy. A capability map aims to support business executives’ strategic discussions and decisions. With such a map, you’ll be able to analyse your organisation by looking at it holistically, from a business perspective.
A capability map is drawn up in clear language, without technological jargon, so that non-IT stakeholders can understand it easily. A well-understood capability map quickly becomes the backdrop for many different discussions. For example, the capability map can add value to your decision-making by showing the following:
- A roadmap for successfully executing transformation initiatives
- A path to maximising and prioritising your investments by assessing their architecture impact
- How to ensure end-to-end risk management to increase resilience by relating security concepts such as threats, vulnerabilities, risks and controls to an architectural blueprint of your organisation
Make digital transformation concrete
Digital transformation often makes organisations more complex and intertwined. As clichéd as it may sound, you need to have the technological upper hand in order to gain a competitive edge. Armed with enterprise architecture tools such as BiZZdesign HoriZZon, architects can help you make data-influenced decisions and execute your organisation’s transformation initiatives with confidence.
Those transformation change initiatives shouldn’t be a disruption. Success shouldn’t be by chance. It should be by design.
Learn how to execute digital transformation change initiatives with confidence. Download our whitepaper: From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning.
Discover how BiZZdesign can help you dramatically increase the success rate of your digital transformation, strategic investment allocation and risk-management initiatives.
INDUSTRY VIEW BY BIZZDESIGN
Change is constant – and BMC has helped companies manage it and thrive for more than 40 years
Change is constant. But sometimes, the pace is so fast, or the scale so large, that it is more than a change. It’s a revolution. And an opportunity.
We live in these times.
We have all learned to adjust to uncertainty and change. The pandemic has brought some industries to a standstill while others have flourished, benefiting from necessary changes to operating models, customer preferences and technology shifts that have transformed the nature of work and business.
Companies have had opportunities to leverage technology, harness the power of data and remain adaptable – be it in navigating market turbulence, adjusting to supply chain challenges, or knowing when and how to launch new products and services. A volatile market has brought with it examples of companies that intelligently navigated to success, almost as though they had a crystal ball.
A software technology leader for more than four decades, BMC partners with the world’s leading brands by helping them run their businesses while reinventing them for this new era.
Four-decade track record
BMC traces its roots as a leading innovator to 1980, in the early days of enterprise IT – first as a specialist in management, monitoring and optimisation software for mainframes. Through strategic acquisitions and relentless R&D, we evolved alongside our customers and the industry. From the emergence of networking and distributed systems, through the adoption of cloud and mobile frameworks, to the era of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, where agility, customer-centricity, and actionable insights reign, we continue to deliver the solutions for success today and into the future.
We count some of the world’s leading innovators as our customers and partners in digital reinvention, including 84 per cent of the Forbes Global 100. Because of this experience and focus on innovation, we’re uniquely situated to help companies adapt their organisations for hybrid work, faster digital commerce and more autonomous services.
So how has this been put into practice? Multinational supermarket chain Carrefour operates thousands of stores, ranging from supermarkets to convenience store-sized Carrefour Express formats. Each country’s consumers have distinct tastes and preferences. Varied store sizes have different restocking and pricing needs. Across its varied geographies, the company relies on Control-M by BMC to orchestrate the business processes for approximately 12,000 stores in 30 countries, ensuring consistent restocking, pricing and discounts.
We’ve helped Carrefour automate its business processes uniformly to ensure that each store can operate with optimal stock and staffing. From batch processing of transactions at the end of the day to near real-time management of inventory, Carrefour is showing how automation everywhere supports its path to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.
And this experience is just one of many ways BMC is helping customers to digitally transform their business.
Companies continue to invest heavily in automation and digital tools to support new realities: new collaboration software to enhance the productivity of their workforce, chatbots to support the customer journey, and intelligent automation that manages repetitive tasks and workflows.
These tools are particularly useful and impactful when organisations can identify, analyse and apply the enormous amount of data that enterprise systems generate every day. Every employee interaction, each website visit, and every application use generates more data that can be translated into actionable insights. Knowing that global data volume in 2021 is expected to reach 79 zettabytes and that by 2025 it is expected to double, we need to find ways to use all this data to move faster than the competition and find ways to differentiate.
Eye on the future
In 2020 we introduced the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, or ADE – our vision of a future in which companies can identify new opportunities and pivot quickly to capitalise them for tomorrow’s growth amid changing and transformative times. In our view, ADEs will leverage technology to deploy automation everywhere, deliver transcendent customer experiences, rely on adaptive cyber-security, and extend the agile software development principles known as DevOps to other functions of the organisation.
Data is the lifeblood of the ADE. Collected and curated from across the business, it can be analysed and distilled into actionable insights, enabling organisations to adjust quickly and effectively.
But we know that it’s not about how much data you have, it’s how you use it that will deliver immense business value. BMC is not a data analytics company. We are a data operations company. Our specialty is extracting and optimising data from assets across an organisation – whether they come from mainframes, data centres, the cloud, mobile, or emerging edge computing technologies.
An IBM study revealed that 80 per cent of data is dark and unstructured. We’re bringing together data points from enterprise service management with insights from AIOps to automate the provisioning and remediation of services, all to help you deliver the experience your customers expect. We can support DevOps by marrying IT operations data with service management data and applying machine learning algorithms to these datasets for reliability analytics. And we’re doing so much more. Imagine the possibilities when we can bring more data to light…
When digitally transforming your business, it is important to align with organisations that can run and reinvent your business on the ADE journey. Learn more about how you can leverage automation everywhere, drive business outcomes with data, and deliver a transcendent customer experience at BMC.com/ade.
Ayman Sayed
President and CEO, BMC
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM BMC
The metaverse: the new digital economy?
The importance of building the metaverse in an open and decentralised manner.
Imagine a virtual world in which you spend most of your working hours. A world in which you go to work, do your shopping, watch movies, play games, learn, travel, date and live out all the shared experiences you would typically have in a physical world. A persistent, immersive, comprehensive space in which everything and everyone is present.
The metaverse, in one form or another, has long been a staple of science fiction. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash gets the credit for the name, and its most well-known definition, although related concepts had been around ever since the 80s in a wide variety of media, ranging from novels to videogames. The technology required was too futuristic back then but, with accelerating development in the relevant fields, a path towards the metaverse finally seems to be forming. The choices we make over the next decade may impact the future of society and technology in ways that are at least comparable to the advent of the internet or smartphones.
Metaverse predictions
It is hard to predict, at this point, how we will interface with this world and whether it will truly present as one instance or a collection thereof. What is clear is that realising this idea is not possible in a world of silos and walled gardens. Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of its user count, is critical in this context – there is little point in living in a void.
The challenges underlying the metaverse are immense. Human-computer interaction technology is far from ready, with the metaverse potentially being accessible on existing devices but benefiting from improved and more seamless virtual reality and augmented reality experiences, and potentially brain-computer interaction. The storage, networking and computational requirements may be orders of magnitude above anything today. Security will be critical, as will privacy and intellectual property.
For several of these challenges, the Web 3.0 movement may hold the solution. As philosophical as it is technical, its members have been creating tools for building an open, decentralised and democratic internet for the last decade. Can these tools be used to create a more participatory economy, empowering users to go from mere consumers to purveyors of services and goods in a truly globalised world not subject to country borders and geographical disadvantages?
Is a digital economy in sight?
Blockchain networks, whose defining characteristics are the lack of a central authority, may provide a neutral ledger underlying payment and financial services denominated in a panoply of virtual currencies. Smart contracts may mediate transactions and encode appropriate incentive mechanisms. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), whose market slumped after a Q2 peak in crypto-art transactions, may find their killer application as the metaverse property registry. Tools for decentralised file storage, computation and self-sovereign identity management are already available and undergoing constant improvement.
In parallel, several groups are working on related standards. The adoption of open standards is essential in ensuring that developers can plug their applications into the metaverse, that virtual asset formats can be universally interpreted, and that users can choose which access interface they use.
A fully realised metaverse won’t just be a part of the digital economy – it will be its own worldwide and quasi-independent economy, whose implications may end up reweaving the fabric of society. We must strive to make the metaverse a force for global equality and inclusivity – in doing so, we will also be working towards a better reality.
Jorge Soares
Jorge Soares is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and research programme manager at Protocol Labs, an open-source R&D lab that builds protocols, tools and services to decentralise and improve the internet. Jorge holds BSc and MSc degrees in communication networks engineering and received a joint PhD from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and Instituto Superior Técnico for his research in ocean robotics and distributed robot olfaction. He worked as a patent examiner with the European Patent Office, where he focused on human-computer interaction and computer construction.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM IEEE
Five ways the internet era has changed British English – new research
The dramatic changes in technology over the past 20 or so years, from the internet to the smartphone and digital assistants like Alexa, have made communication more accessible than ever before. We have created an online world where we post, share, comment, express views and seek information as well as relationships. These changes have also transformed the language we use.
Our new study based on the British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) – a 100 million-word sample of current language – shows us just how language has changed in the internet era. This data was contrasted with the original British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) – a comparable data set which samples British English from the early 1990s.
The study employed a methodology called corpus linguistics, which analyses large amounts of language using specialised software. The method allows researchers to search and compare word frequencies across different texts and genres, revealing the patterns and trends in language over time. The software used in this study was developed at Lancaster University and is freely available for download together with the data.
Here are some of the most striking changes:
1. We’ve become more informal
Our study revealed that overall, British English has become much more informal. This is true not only in blog posts and social media, where informality would be expected, but across the whole spectrum of genres, from fiction to newspapers, political speeches and academic writing.
Take the example below, from a recent academic paper -– a genre that has traditionally been perceived as formal. What is new about the language of this text is the high frequency of informal features like contractions (isn’t) and second and first person pronouns. This is something that would be fairly unusual before the internet revolution.
For at least on a popular Christian conception, when you believe something truly on the basis of faith this isn’t because of anything you’re naturally competent to do…I argue in this article that there’s no deep tension between faith-based knowledge and virtue epistemology.
2. We use ‘Mr and Mrs’ less often
Compared to 20 years ago, we are now more likely to address people using their first names than by more formal forms of address. The frequency of use of Mr and Mrs has decreased by 30 per cent and 56 per cent, respectively. The decrease in the use of Mrs has been partly counterbalanced by the increase in the use of Ms, but the overall decrease in the use of all the formal forms of address combined is 33 per cent.
3. ‘Elanguage’
The internet has transformed not only how we use language, but also the words themselves. The following terms, acronyms and spellings are part of a register known as “elanguage”: Alexa, app, awesome, blog, congrats, email, fab, Facebook, fitbit, Im, Instagram, iPad, iPhone, Ive, Lol, omg, tbh, tweet, Twitter and website.
Each word in this list has a story behind it. Take, for example, the word app, which is somewhat symbolic for the technological revolution. Although the first uses of this term are from the early 1990s, there are only a handful of examples of this word being used in the 100 million words of the BNC1994. One example, from a computer magazine:
To run your average Windows app you’ll need 4Mb of RAM, a 100Mb hard disk.
In the early 1990s, the term used to refer to an app was software with 9,356 examples in the BNC1994. Nowadays, software is used much less frequently with a 49 per cent decrease in use. On the other hand, app has considerably increased its frequency of use in elanguage (167 per million words) as well as in general British English (41 per million words).
4. Farewell to modals
The use of modal verbs such as must, may and shall has reached new lows. Must is now used just over 350 times per million words, a 42 per cent decrease over the last 20 years. May marked a similar decrease (41 per cent) as must, while shall changed even more dramatically, a 61 per cent decrease.
These changes are associated with the overall shift of British English towards informality. The following sentences, both from BNC1994, now sound slightly old-fashioned and formal:
Of course, we shall not be staying here long.
May I take my jacket off, please?
The decrease in the frequencies of modals started in English at the beginning of the 20th century, when must and may appeared well over 1,000 times per million words. Shall has always been the verb with the lowest frequency (400 per million words at the beginning of the 20th century and 64 per million words in present-day English). The graph below shows a clear trajectory of decrease of the core modals in English. If the trend continues at the same rate, these modals will be practically out of use by 2050. Note, however, that language change rarely follows a straightforward linear pattern of decrease.
5. Punctuation
Language change is also demonstrated in subtle linguistic features like punctuation marks. These indicate how long our sentences are, and what message and tone these carry: statements, questions or exclamations.
Most common punctuation marks are used more frequently now than they were in the early 1990s. This is particularly noticeable in the case of question marks (64 per cent increase) and exclamation marks (103 per cent increase). This might be a sign of language becoming more interactive and carrying a more emotional load. There is a small (5 per cent) decrease in the use of semicolons, which are typically used in a more formal style of writing.
The corpus study offers a unique insight into the changes to lexical and grammatical features of British English over the years – only a few examples of which were given in this article. These reflect changes in technology as well as society. While language is always changing, the unprecedented access to a variety of forms of language on the internet, where one doesn’t need to be a fiction writer or a journalist to reach thousands or millions of readers, has accelerated informalisation of language.
Vaclav Brezina, Senior Lecturer in corpus linguistics, Lancaster University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.