Gartner calls it the "Trough of Disillusionment".
It's the period of time after the hype about some new technology has vapourised, the time when ordinary people start to use the technology and find it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Natural-language question answering – or, "Hey Siri!" as it's also known – one of the most hyped technologies of the past few years, will spend 2017 in the Trough, says Gartner, a company which specialises in researching and analysing the technology sector. Augmented reality, a technology which likewise has been kicking around for some years now, which usually involves adding information or graphics or, in the case of Pokémon Go, cartoonish animals to a live video screen on a mobile phone, will also spend 2017 in the Trough of Disillusionment, awaiting the time five to ten years from now when the technology is mature enough to gain widespread adoption and enter what Gartner calls the "Slope of Enlightenment".
Here in the Financial Review's Digital Life Labs, where we spend our days reviewing gadgets, we have our own language for the adoption curve of technology, and our own thoughts on what will and won't be hot in 2017. What Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment we call "The Morning After The Night Before". What Gartner calls the Slope of Enlightenment we call the "Shut Up And Take My Money" stage of adoption.
And while we don't disagree with Gartner on the broad strokes of where things are heading in the coming 12 months, there are a few developments on the horizon that, if they don't actually drag some technologies out of the Morning After The Night Before stage and into the Shut Up And Take My Money stage, will at least provide the technology thirsty amongst us with what we like to call "The Hair of The Dog".
Hey Viv!
The technologies that let us ask questions of our mobile phones are going to begin a transformation out of more natural-language question answering, as Gartner put it, and into a stage where they start to become problem solvers.
In October 2016, the world's largest consumer electronics manufacturer Samsung purchased a small company known as Viv Labs, which was founded by the creators of Apple's Siri natural-language question answerer, but which has gone on to create artificial intelligence engines that, put very simply, can write their own algorithms when presented with a novel problem. That sort of self-teaching, which is rumoured will first appear in Samsung's Galaxy S8 phone in 2017, is expected to be the breakthrough that takes Artificial Intelligence out of the realm of "Hey Siri, what's the weather like today?", to "Hey Viv, cancel my rental car booking if the fog at Melbourne airport doesn't lift by noon".
Google, which entered into the mobile phone selling business in 2016 with its Pixel phones, is also going to push consumer-oriented Artificial Intelligence hard in 2017. The Google Assistant artificial intelligence engine, that takes advantage of the vast trove of data Google has built up through search, is going to get better at conducting long-and-involved conversations with humans, and is going to appear in many more devices than just the Pixel. It will be in Android phones from other manufacturers, and in other devices such as the Google Home speaker, which will come to Australia in 2017.
Meanwhile, voice controls will start to appear in more devices. It's expected (or at the very least, hoped) that Sonos, the leading maker of multi-room audio systems, will build voice into its speakers, some of which already have microphones that were used for another purpose. Just how smart the voice controls are will be the thing: will you be able to say "Play me that song that is used in the opening credits of Peaky Blinders", or will you have to say "Play Red Right Hand by Nick Cave"? Probably the latter, heading towards the former in coming years.
The year won't get us all the way the way to the Shut Up And Take My Money phase for AI – Viv won't be reliable enough that anyone would dream of allowing it to make and modify bookings for us without our double-checking them first, for instance, rendering its utility somewhat diminished – but it should be enough to make the technology far more useful to the millions who already have it, free of charge and hitherto unused in their smart phones.
Go, Pokémon, Go!
In its 2016 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, Gartner has Augmented Reality (AR) deep in the Trough of Disillusionment, years away from successful mainstream adoption.
That analysis looked a pretty solid predictor of 2017, until Pokémon Go came on the scene in the second half of 2016. Now there's no doubting that AR is going to be huge (if not always great) in 2017. Post Pokémon, Apple boss Tim Cook said he expected augmented reality would eventually be much bigger than virtual reality, which was arguably the technology of 2016 and which we can also expect to see lots more of in 2017.
(Though, while were making predictions, 2017 looks more likely to be a year of consolidation for virtual reality, rather than innovation. Most if not all of the major VR platforms established themselves in 2016 – think Sony's PlayStation VR, HTC Vive and Google Daydream – and 2017 needs to be more about getting good content onto those existing platforms.)
Google has an AR platform, known as Tango, which works on its Android operating system and which in 2016 was limited to the Lenovo Phab 2 phone. Tango needs extra cameras on the back of a phone to achieve 3D object tracking, which will limit its spread in 2017 (it would be one thing if it were just a software upgrade, but hardware is a whole other thing), but you can expect to see other phone makers coming out with Tango phones. Motorola, for instance, might come out with a Tango module that can be clipped into its Moto Z phone.
The real problem with advanced AR platforms, though, is that the camera arrays are still relatively larger. Intel's RealSense camera is still much bigger than a regular phone camera, for instance, and given how precious and contested real estate is on a mobile phone, Gartner's analysis still probably holds: it's going to be years before AR gets really good. But in 2017 it's going to be pretty good, and pretty well everywhere.
The Internet of Ugh!
It's no accident that all of our predictions for 2017's hot technology relate to mobile phones in some way. Mobile phones are already near the heart of most consumer's lives, and increasingly they're central to other, previously unrelated technology, too. Many people already turn their lights on with a phone, for instance, and that trend is only going to continue in 2017.
We spent a lot of time in 2016 setting up such phone-controlled, internet-enabled home automation – the so-called "Internet of Things" – and for the most part, we found the devices to be hopelessly unreliable. A light that sometimes switches on automatically when you get home is not a lot better than useless, and not nearly as useful as a good old fashioned light switch which, you know, just works.
Towards the end of the year, however, continuous firmware upgrades had started to get the reliability issues under control. So 2017 might not see a dramatic increase in the number and variety of IoT devices available for consumers, so much as in improvement in the quality of the devices that are already out there. That could improve word-of-mouth recommendations, which could in turn lead to a new explosion in IoT devices, though not necessarily in 2017.
Meanwhile, IoT technology in cars will pick up, with Apple's CarPlay and Google's Android Auto getting more traction. Samsung's SmartThings should at long last arrive, Google will do more and more hardware that will be internet enabled (2017 is going to be a big year for Google hardware) and Apple's own IoT platform, HomeKit, should start to bear fruit.
If nothing else, 2017 will be the year when the Internet of Things starts to get good.
