We'll be writing far more about it in coming months but it is a lot closer to what most people call 'AI' than the things currently being touted as 'AI' (which are typically just machine learning algorithms). It's been mooted for years, decades, and progress is certainly slow. Interestingly neither appeared on the 2012/13 charts!ДЄrtificial General Intelligence is far more interesting. In fact I'd have thought that Machine Learning is probably approaching the plateau as it appears to crop up everywhere and with good results, and Deep Learning is not far behind. Deep Learning is really just a development of Machine Learning, and its interesting that they have them both clustered together at the peak. In fact if we compare the 2012/20 charts we can see that ' Virtual Assistants' 4-5 years ago were just over the Peak, but now in 2017 'Virtual Assistants' is actually just approaching the Peak! So Gartner appear to have split the old Virtual Assistant into a simpler, now mainstream, Virtual Personal Assistant, and a new Virtual Assistant representing those still hard to do elements of the 1990s vision.Д«ack to 2017 - the new entrants on the Hype Cycle of interest since 2016 are Artificial General Intelligence and Deep Learning. But they are a far cry from the virtual PAs that we were promised in the mobile phone videos of the 90s and 00s. Now if we take this to mean Siri, Alexa and co that seems reasonable - I have Siri in my pocket and Alexa on my desk as I write. One tech that was in 2016 but is missing from 2017 is Virtual Personal Assistants.

In 2012 Virtual Worlds (Second Life and it's ilk) were at the bottom of the Trough, in 2013 (as the Oculus Rift hype started) they were replaced by Virtual Reality! Virtual Worlds (and SL) are still around - although often rechristened Social Virtual Realities - and we'd guess they are still lingering in the Trough as their potential is still a long way from being realised. Spot the difference?Д¬lue - look at the Trough of Disillusionment. This seems reasonable, although a more detailed analysis (which we may do later) would probably put VR in different sectors at different points on the cycle - so whilst this position seems OK for gaming and training I'd be tempted to put it still up on the Peak of Inflated Expectations when it comes to mass media entertainment or personal communications.ДЄs a side-line it's interesting to look at these two Gartner charts from 20. We focus here only on the areas of keenest interest to us at Daden, namely AI/chatbots and 3D immersive environments.ДЇirst off, it's interesting to see that they have VR now pulling well out of the Trough of Disillusionment, and only 2-5 years to mainstream adoption. We've watched Virtual Worlds ( and then Virtual Reality) work its way along the curve over the last decade, but this year's chart has a number of interesting features which we thought might be worth discussing. Every year the Gartner Group (well known tech analysts) publish their ' hype-cycle' - showing whereabouts emergent technologies are on the journey from first conception to productive tool.

Gartner hype cycle 2017