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Sensei Article Featured in Oregon State Bar Bulletin

April 17, 2018

“Alexa and Associates: Are Virtual Personal Assistants Safe to Use In Your Law Office?” by Sensei’s Sharon Nelson and John Simek was featured in the February/March 2018 edition of the Oregon State Bar Bulletin.

Excerpt: Many commentators predicted that 2017 would be the year of Amazon’s Alexa. Alexa is one of several virtual voice assistants that are working their way into our everyday lives. The Amazon Echo and the smaller Echo Dot had a great sales year in 2017 and finished off the holiday season by selling tens of millions of Alexa units to customers. On Cyber Monday, the best-selling item was the Echo Dot. Amazon does not reveal specific sales numbers, but an analysis by Voicebot puts Echo sales between 19.5-21.5 million units through Q3 of 2017. That’s a lot of hardware.

Alexa is just one of the virtual assistants available for lawyers today. There’s also Google Home/Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Siri was the first on the market but has rapidly lost ground to Alexa and Google Assistant, the two big players in the virtual assistant offerings. Google has the advantage for research since it has access to the power of Google search. Alexa is a better integration device, especially with the addition of “skills” that allow it to connect to other services and apps. Bixby is the newest player in the virtual assistant space and promises to have some unique features that don’t exist in the others. One such feature is the ability to take a picture of something in a foreign language (e.g. road sign, business advertisement, etc.) and Bixby will translate it for you

Read the entire article here: https://www.osbar.org/bulletin/issues/2018/2018FebruaryMarch/index.html (article on page 36)