Because voice recognition and artificial intelligence are two sides of a very valuable coin…
Zuznow is a little-known vendor that offers a mobile development platform. Essentially Zuznow is focused on enabling businesses, even those businesses without technical development resource on staff, to create mobile applications. It’s a busy space, and it’s getting busier—large vendors (Salesforce, BMC), smaller vendors (Caspio, Mendix) and standalone mobile application development platforms (Xamarin) are all trying to solve this problem.
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Zuznow wants to steal a march on the opposition with the introduction of its intelligent voice assistant. The tool can be thought of as a plug-and-play Siri. Indeed Zuznow has even called the offering Susie, as an homage of Apple’s Siri voice assistant. Zuznow promises that it is delivering the world’s first intelligent assistant plugin that brings voice-control and chatbots to any enterprise mobile app within hours.
Anyway, nomenclature aside, Susie is trying to make it quicker for developers to create natural language conversations within their applications without the need to know about artificial intelligence (AI) or voice recognition. For those who are interested, here is a link to a video of Susie in action
“A big focus for Zuznow is to empower enterprises to react in real time to market [user interface] and [user experience] trends, with the goal to continuously increase their clients’ engagement,” said Chen Levkovich, CEO and founder of Zuznow. “We designed Susie to do just that; users expect this level of sophistication when using an app, whether in their personal or professional lives, and this latest capability allows our clients to deliver with little coding.”
My POV
Zuznow initially launched a few months ago. Or at least it was going to until they pulled the pin. I covered the launch and was skeptical about the company and the platform for a number of reasons. As I wrote at the time, “Zuznow is, as I said at the start, an almost completely unknown player in this space. Doing a quick Google Trends search (a very coarse, but informative analysis of how much impact a brand has in the marketplace), Zuznow is all but invisible.”
Nothing has changed in that time, although Zuznow has admittedly moved on to talking not only about AI but also about chatbots (apparently Susie is applicable to those producing chatbots, as well).
I still hold by my analysis that, notwithstanding its invisibility, Zuznow looks like a pretty cool offering, but I struggle with the fact that until now no vendor pushing a no-code development tool has really gotten traction. Whether that’s because the reality of creating strong offerings is that real development is required or whether it’s because the ingrained approaches to development are just too deep within organization, it’s hard to say.
Zuznow would probably say it’s the former.
While Susie looks pretty interesting, Zuznow would seem to have a far more existential problem to deal with: It is invisible and unknown, and that is often a cause for irrelevance. I’m not sure if Susie or Siri have a good answer to that problem.
