Mobile apps continue to penetrate every walk of life. From healthcare to enterprise operations to retail to public administration, mobile apps pretty much influence every field, every aspect of life.
But what mobile apps most consummately transform is the way people interact or communicate with each other. Now, the essential function of making a regular voice call has taken the backseat among the preferred methods of communication.
What are the new ways mobile apps allow us to communicate? How are these new ways of mobile communication and interaction influencing our user behavior? What social impact do these new ways of mobile communication have?
Throughout this blog post, we are going to shed some light on these questions by looking at some of the most popular types of apps and how they impact our lives.
Table of Contents
Social Chat Apps
Social chat transformed the way people communicate and stay in touch with their near and dear ones, and it’s brought together distant acquaintances and strangers. Apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, and many others transformed how we communicate and keep in touch with people.
Apart from regular peer-to-peer messaging, these apps also make it possible to create interest-specific groups, collaborate, and communicate their priorities and needs. Marketers now target these apps all over the globe for making meaningful, well-targeted communication to customer prospects.
Chat apps also have seen the increasing presence of bots and tools for customer service and support functions created by enterprises. Of course, the biggest value proposition of these chat messaging apps is the privacy and security ensured by powerful encryption. As far as maintaining data privacy is concerned, different social chat apps offer competitive value with various encryption methods and ease of protecting data.
Another value proposition of social chat is the ease of making both video and audio calls. Most of these apps also allow sharing media files, documents, and contents of all types. Lastly, they allow incorporating fun in chat messages through emojis, animated characters, and expressions as per the choice and the context of the conversation.
Live Streaming
Going live from social platforms has been a popular way to conduct urgent communication and create real-time content for intended people. When you go live to a stream of events, or even some mishaps or emergencies, this helps generate social consensus and allows you to communicate to many people across locations. It can also be used for informational and entertainment purposes, as many businesses are using platforms like YouTube and Facebook Live to run live streaming programs or podcasts.
Live streaming in social media and other apps has abolished geographical boundaries and location constraints for passing actual information. It revolutionized the way real-time communication can take place and keep people synced to a situation. This has also emerged as the alternate people’s medium for generating news content from places where traditional media has the least presence.
The social impact of live streaming has been huge in many countries. Companies involved in mobile app development believe that live streaming is the single most popular feature that any new social media or chat app should look to incorporate.
Video Conferencing
Video conferencing is a kind of feature most associated with chat apps allowing real-time or live communication. The participants on both ends can see each other. Undoubtedly, the feature played a crucial role in popularizing social chat as people remotely located can see each other live and communicate.
But video conferencing as a standalone app for more serious purposes such as business meetings or doctor appointments was introduced by apps such as Zoom. During the COVID outbreak and resulting lockdown in most parts of the globe, Zoom became the preferred tool for employees to collaborate and communicate while working from home.
Zoom and similar apps also came to the rescue of students and teachers by allowing them to conduct classes for months when schools were shut. Video conferencing apps truly became the lifeline of many professionals, students, teachers, and administrators during the pandemic-led lockdown.
Apps for Real-Time Collaboration
Mobile apps allowing real-time collaboration among business employees are there for some time. They continue to play a big role in streamlining business processes and improving productivity with a remote workforce spread worldwide.
Many Google apps such as Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Hangouts, and Google Meet serve as ideal examples of how remote teams and employees stay in touch, collaborate, take part in meetings, and do everything that working in regular workplaces involves. There are several other great alternatives like Trello, Slack, Zapier, and others.
Intelligent Chatbots & Virtual Assistants
Chatbots offer another revolutionary way people can communicate and get their problems solved and queries answered. Instead of human interactions for customer support and services, now chatbots are employed to guide customers on regular problems and answer common queries. This, apart from saving time and resources, also offers relief from human biases and errors in communication.
Chatbots are increasingly getting more intelligent and more equipped to shape their communication as per the questioner’s intent or based on the data-driven insights of the particular user. These intelligent chatbots are making the digital journey of customers much easier by personalizing interactions. They are also being used as marketing tools for providing personalized recommendations and suggestions.
Voice Search & Voice Commands
Finally, the simple and effective tactic of using voice search to find content on the web and the voice commands to interact with the digital interfaces made a revolutionary impact on our everyday communication.
To find a relevant video on YouTube or locate an answer via a Google search, all you need to do is to speak out the search term, and the results come pop up on your screen.
We are increasingly habituated to speak to devices over moving our fingers on a keyboard or tapping device buttons. That’s a big shift from our earlier communication.
Voice interactions with smart home gadgets and virtual assistants to fetch information and voice commands to carry out tasks have already pushed our communication to the very borderline of human-machine differences.
Conclusion
All the examples we provided and explained so far demonstrate how human interactions have evolved thanks to mobile apps. Mobile apps have played an instrumental role in revolutionizing human communication with innovative machine capabilities.
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- How Mobile Apps Influence The Way We Interact With People? - May 21, 2021
