Amazon Alexa has the power to be a lever of the digital divide. Here is how…

Conversational UIs (CUI) have been gaining rapid prominence this year. If web applications enabled new user conveniences (like self-service travel booking and e-commerce) in the 1990s, Mobile apps opened up different set of conveniences since 2007 (like GPS navigation, ride hailing, and messengers). Over the past two years, CUIs like Amazon Alexa have begun to enable another interaction mode that has the potential to unlock new set user conveniences and use cases like never before. Conversational UIs include both text based and voice based UIs. The focus of this blog post is on voice based UI.