Gamification Nation Podcast

Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm your show host and the chief game changer and CEO at Gamification Nation. And this is the second installment in our series inclusive by design. When it comes to inclusion, the big question is, how do I know I am being inclusive? How do I know I'm not excluding certain people by being inclusive to other people, et cetera. And you know, what is inclusion in the first place? And I guess it starts with diversity as a spectrum in my view. So the first thing to notice is, for me, inclusion is about culture, is about abilities, it's about gender, it's about age. It may be other choices that are more lifestyle related, but for most businesses, it comes to creating an environment where everybody has the opportunity to succeed, to their level of ability, their level of wish, desire. So I guess it's, in some sense, slightly philosophical in other ways. There's also very practical things to think about. But first of all, let's talk about four areas, of what I would see key, in workplace kind of workplace focus, diversity or work, workplace focused inclusion. And they are a culture, first of all. So culture can be the company culture, but it can also be the country culture. It can be the melting pot of nationalities, cultures that are working for you. And if you're a global organisation, it may be the interrelationship between all of those suppliers, providers, the head office, the local office. And if you are, let's say a national organisation, it can be head office and local office. It can be regional differences. And I think, you know, we all have some sort of culture that we reflect and you know, whether that's a good or a bad one that remains to be seen. But from an inclusion perspective, I would say look at it as a spectrum. Some of us have a global vision and want to make the world or workplace others have a very clear national vision. No, I'm only focused on, you know, this region. Therefore, the people that interact with my clients would need to either support this region as a near native or be a near native. So, you know, so those are the kinds of typical questions that you would ask there. And then a local business may mean you need local knowledge. I mean, just think about it. If we look at a, let's say you're a local taxi driver, you want them to know the local area to get you to your destination as fast as possible. Of course they can be using great apps, I give them the best routes, et cetera. But once the GPS doesn't work or it gets it wrong, you don't want them to be stuck and you know, clocking up a massive big bill. You also want to be able to communicate with them. So in a national context, you could have a scenario where people need to know and we know have been guilty of that in some countries. I visit and speak a lot in many areas. And, you know, at one point I was trying to go by train from one place to another and the person at the rail car desk said, no, you can't do that miss, because geographically that's not possible. And I sort of went, oh, oops, I didn't realize that which he grabbed the, the map where she said, oh here miss, there's a, here's the map of the rail network and you can check for yourself. And you know, I thought it was a very nice, respectful way of dealing with my lack of, uh, the national rail network knowledge. And that's okay. You know, I, I was definitely in the wrong place. And then if you have a global mindset, it might mean that you don't limit yourself to just national or local markets. It may mean that you have a staff that's also diverse and spread out all over the place. And that comes with its own, I suppose its own difficulties from time zones to language use to certain habits that are really acceptable in one culture, but maybe not so much in another. We've worked on a few projects around cultural acceptance and cultural inclusion, including a kind of a fun way of getting people,

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. This week I want to start a bit of a series around inclusion and design. In fact, I want to name it inclusive by design, because it's scenario that we basically focus on quite a bit. And actually I as a woman in the gamification space specifically wanted to join the gamification space to make it more inclusive, because when I looked at the industry of gamification back in the mid 2000s, I saw a lot of young white men and the odd Asian man and they didn't necessarily relate to me. They didn't necessarily speak my language. And some of the designs that I saw also didn't quite appeal to me. At first I said, "Oh, this is maybe just me personally. Maybe it's just not my thing." But then I asked around. I also went looking for research and actually found that a lot of the time it was very one track focused, very much focused on their experience of life, their experience of the world and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not 100% inclusive because you're only coming with one worldview. Just like if I design something just by myself, it would only have my own worldview in it. So that was not an indication of their masculinity or anything else. But I also felt that we were missing a trick. And actually I was really quite passionate about it. We were missing a trick in a sense that gamification was becoming this big buzzword, especially in the corporate learning space, and it wasn't actually working. And I could see clearly why because it wasn't appealing. It was a lot of the time, very competitive. It was a lot of the time, very superficial. And I went, "No, there's more to this." I knew from my work up to that point where I had been using games, gamification and game elements for all sorts of things throughout change management, throughout leadership throughout training, I knew it worked and I said, "No, no, there has to be another way. There has to be a way that we can be inclusive by design, but we need to change our approach." So basically I wanted to bring that voice and bring that perspective of let's be inclusive by design. Now, just recently I gave a keynote speech at an event, pretty much focused around people in the academic world. And I have to say I was personally challenged a little bit from a confidence perspective I think as well to say that, "Look, I'm not a scientist. I'm a field worker. I'm a practitioner. I work with my clients to the best of my ability." I read a lot of research and I do my best to integrate what people find in it insofar that I can understand it because I also admit some of the scientific papers out there on games, gamification, diversity, inclusion, differences between age, culture, gender, abilities, some of them are seriously hard to make sense of if they're written for scientific purposes. So anything I can read, I will and anything I can't read, I will have to [inaudible 00:02:58] just purely out of practical reasons. What occurred to me is that when we talk about inclusion and diversity or inclusion by design better, it is in fact a conscious action. It is first and foremost an attitude because we all have our preferences. We all have maybe things we get a bit fearful about that make us feel threatened. Just like the academics made me feel threatened like, "Oh gosh, what can I possibly offer? I'm merely a mere mortal living in the world of the corporate sector doing my business the best I can." But you know what? I haven't written a paper about it. I haven't actually proven my theory left right and center. If somebody wants to take on my theory and prove it, absolutely love it. Do talk to me. That bias in my head even was preventing me from delivering the best possible talk. So from an inclusive by design perspective, I also needed to make sure that I could not only engage to myself to the best of my ability, but also deliver something that was, I suppose, interesting enough for the group to take something away fro...

Welcome to the first episode of the Gamification Nation podcast. It's an exciting new way for me to connect and share with you in audio format. We've been hard at work to get this launched and I'm thrilled that we are finally out with this first episode. In this episode, I share with you the most common question on what is gamification and why it's essential in this modern day. How you can use this to advance your business and more. So be sure to subscribe. You can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Don't forget to subscribe! Please don't forget to leave us a review or comment here or even on iTunes and Stitcher. Your thoughts, questions, and feedback are always welcome.

Welcome to this week's A Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief Gamechanger at Gamification Nation, and this week's question is a good one. How will VR, AR, MR, and what on earth is the difference between all those, and Gamification play nice? It's a question that comes up from time to time. Because in learning, and in HR, we find that a lot of people have no idea what all the buzz words and all of the... they have an idea, but maybe not a full understanding of what the buzz words stands for and how they can all work together or where they're all separate beasts that you should be treating differently. So, the purpose of today's podcast is to answer the questions of what are these different reality things? Does that combine well with Gamification? Does it not? Should you just do one and not engage with the other? Or, how do you best integrate it into your suite of learning related solutions for your workers, or HR related solutions for your workers? Or whichever way you see fit on using a mix of these things in the workplace. First things first, let's start with the terminology. VR, or virtual reality, is where you typically today need a headset like an oculus rift or a google cardboard or any variety of quality devices in between or above. Basically, what that allows you do to is to escape into a virtual world. Now, in a virtual world, or in virtual reality today, most of the time we need to exclude what is going on around us and we step completely into that virtual space. Which is a great tool for, for example, when you need to simulate environments that people might not be use to. For example, flight simulators are an experience that we could call virtual reality today. Although, we could argue that you could actually play all of it as a mixed reality play because if the person is sitting in the middle of it and touching real equipment but the visuals are displayed on a screen, you're combining virtual reality with reality and giving a lifelike experience even though it's not for real. Simulations, for years have been, in a space in my view, where you find virtual and reality kind of blending together and giving feedback to each other. Virtual reality was designed, originally, with the idea of games. A lot of games, like escape rooms, can be played in virtual reality, but some of the cool games today are completely virtual reality based. If you are not sure what to test or what to try out there's two I would recommend trying. First of all any roller coaster experience, if you're not too afraid of roller coasters that is. And the other one is the play saber where you basically do a massive drum kind of set up and you're trying to keep up with the beat in virtual reality, which is pretty awesome. Or an escape room, of course, where you're in a virtual reality playroom and you need to unlock clues in order to get out. Virtual reality is typically, still today, with headsets which blank out reality. Augmented reality, most of us will have at some point heard of Pokemon Go or at least... you know, maybe not played but at least heard of Pokemon Go the game. Which, basically, brought augmented reality into our everyday, mass presence as such. It's where you combine the camera use of your smart phone with, lets say, fictional characters like Pokemon. And you combine real life and whatever is on your screen together to take some funny pictures, to catch them where they are, where you could be. Further than that, augmented reality is developing and some of the really cool type of material that's coming out is where it is much more seamless so that you don't even need a smart phone anymore. Which you might have holographic screens popping up. You may have heard of HoloLens, where actual human beings are holograms and you can pop up wherever your hologram needs to be for that time. It's basically combining reality with some form of digital augmentation.

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I am the Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation, and this week's question of gamification is one I have. I suppose it's in light of all the global politics that are going on everywhere. It made me question, are we just all part of one large strategy game by a certain amount of players? Before I go into that, I want to draw analogies to strategy games, and what's happening around this, both in the world of politics and the world of business, because that's how, A, I see business but also, B, I think there's a lot we can learn from it. It also encourages you, and that's my hope that I can inspire you to think critically. Okay, if you were in charge of that game, how would you play it? What cards would you play, and what would winning mean? What's the win condition? Is there a win condition, or are we just heading for a zero sum game where there are no winners, only losers? I guess it's probably out of I would say frustration or desperation. I don't know. It's a blend maybe of the two. As you know, I'm a European working a business in the UK, and with Brexit looming we have a workforce that's all spread over the world. For me, being a global business was always the way I wanted to play the game. I never thought of my business as being just a British company. I actually always felt it was a company playing on a global scale, but now currently the strategy of the politicians is potentially pushing a major, I suppose, spanner in the works, let's just say. It's making me adjust my strategies in order to still continue to play the game I wanted to play. Then I also wonder if I'm only part of the larger playing field. I mean, we're a tiny company in comparison to some of the big names in industry, but in the end of the day we all have a role to play in the strategy game whether we're a low-end small business or a high-end major player like an Apple, an Amazon, an IBM, a Google, whatever. We all have a role to play, but also politicians have a role to play because their sense of government's lack of or insights and wrongdoings can have major impacts. I mean, trying to grow any business in war-based countries is no mean feat. Trying to do business when your company or country is at war with other countries is not so simple. Very realistically, I've had one client refused a platform I advised to use because of the company or the country they were from. They said, "Well we can't possibly, as a Muslim nation, do business with a company from that particular nation." It's real, and I would say an oversight by maybe or maybe not politicians in the UK is that EU companies will choose an EU company to do business with as opposed to a British company unless the British company is the cheapest one on the market and offering lower values, which if you think about, I suppose the EU as a governing body, it has a lot of good to offer. It offered the whole continent of Europe peace for nearly 50 years. It brought about lots of rules that are actually good for business, good for humans, and good for the planet. Do we like them all of the time? Of course not. That's the nature of rules. Just like in any game, we don't like having to stick to rules and having some ways they may impede us from doing how we wanted to do certain things. Yeah. I mean, in a strategy game you will always pivot and choose a different strategy based on the feedback you get from the market, the feedback you get from the game, the choices that are left to you. In the current political climate, I'm having to make choices, and the first choice I made was to wait and see. Now with an impending leaving the EU or Britain leaving the EU after all, unless a general election comes up, which is also still a possibility, it may mean having to set up the group entity, increasing the cost space by having to do double accounting and double offices and double everything. It's a realistic choice,

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. On this question, I get asked a lot by parents, "What are my kids learning on video games, on computer games, on mobile games?" "Should I limit their time on it," is typically the second question. "I am worried about my kids playing too much." It's a very frequently asked question by managers in many organisations with children at home. They see that their children are playing and playing a lot, and I suppose with the World Health Organisation, you're marking gaming as a disorder as well. There's a need to explain why and what the case may be with games and what it brings or doesn't bring to your children or young people that you know. The first thing I will say is as a person growing up, my parents were quite protective and we were not allowed games at all in the house. So when I was growing up, I was always borrowing somebody else's games in school in order to play. In fact, I think at one stage my dad thought that Pong was going to blow up the television. And if you don't know Pong, look it up, it's a very basic game with two balls knocked to the side of the screen and you have to sort of play table tennis on the TV screen. So my uncles had to uninstall it quite quickly after it had launched. What we did do, however, is we had a lot of board games. We had a lot of card games. We were all involved in sports. Although computer things were banned, we still got to play. Actually all of my children's parties were sets of games. Most of them I dreamt up. I was lucky to be born in June, and often then the weather in Belgium was quite nice and quite fun. We typically had really fun things in the garden, in our house. The little puddle pool was used as the hinderness that you had to overcome or the obstacle that you had to overcome rather than the hindrance, which is nice Flemish word for that ... it's an obstacle. One group of the party people had to defend the obstacle and either make you go through it, which gave you immunity, or you had to be cunning enough to distract them and run past them super fast and get to the other side. Things like Tug of War, you name it, we did it. For my confirmation, we had this massive life-sized board where you had to roll the dice and you move forward, and based on where you landed you had to go find the clue in the woods and perform whatever task was related to that clue. If the person that was minding that clue thought you had passed you, you were allowed to continue back to the board and the dice. Things you had to do in order to get over a clue were things like dress up and take a photo, solve a riddle. Sometimes you had to find things. There were always fun, cool stuff that happened. So although I never actually got to own a console of any denomination of sorts, I did love to play and my parents did definitely encourage that. Even though when I asked about a career in gaming, my dad was very adamant that there was no money in games. I guess it was a good ... I would have been seven, so a good couple of decades ago. Let's just say that. Today's kids I think have a bit more of a privilege or access ability, I think. And maybe that's also my worldview of a relatively well to do middle class background, because gaming, let's not forget, this is not cheap. So a lot of kids from the lower end of the market families may still not be able to access any game consoles or just purely because of costs. And if they do, they might have to work really hard to earn access to it. So I think if your kids are gaming, you're already in a nice place and you probably have enough money to help them do certain things. So that's one thing. But what are they learning? So think about it this way. If your children are playing as a team with other kids in their class, in their neighborhood, but even with other kids online that they have never met, like is the case in the large games like World of Warcraft where a whole tribe comes together,

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens, I'm your show host, and I'm also the CEO or Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. This week's question is asked to us from a variety of clients, and it typically goes something like this, is gamification or should gamification be part of a larger strategy? When we get asked that question, it's typically because people have heard that gamification is a thing. They like the concept, they like the fact that we can bring some of the game and play-like feeling into an organisation. But often it also means that they haven't thought through why they want to implement gamification in the first place. Start with why I would say or answer that question with, yes, gamification should always be part of a larger strategy. In fact, I would even say strategy comes first, as opposed to gamification comes first. Now, gamification can be the strategy. I mean, that's also possible. But in the end of the day, you need to have a reason why you are engaging in gamification, why you are even going there. You need to understand if it fits for your culture, if it fits for the type of problem you're trying to solve. Although I feel that gamification has a lot of power and a lot of benefits. It doesn't fix every single problem that you may encounter in an organisation. Sometimes it's simply a case of revising benefits, revising employee rules, or even very simple things as changing things around in an environment. It could be interpersonal related. The one thing you can't gamify is your boss, typically speaking. At best, you can gamify the process, but gamifying people is another story altogether, and gamification in the best form should always be voluntary. Make it voluntary If it's imposed, then as soon as that becomes known, it also causes a backlash of why people don't want to engage or they rebel against it, or they game the system, etc. When you're looking at gamification as a part of your employee facing strategy, I would definitely say it needs to be part of a well thought out strategy, whether that's employee engagement, whether that is a very specific onboarding call, an onboarding strategy, whether that is showcasing how your organisation is a leader in the field. There's a variety of reasons and a variety of things you may want to do as part of a strategy, and gamification could be one. What we see gamification do and where it plays in and ties into strategy, is that it enforces or reinforces the message of your strategy. Gamified on-boarding strategy example Let's give an example. Usually examples work better than me talking about the conceptual side of things. Imagine you have an organisation where people thrive when they're self-sufficient, when they're self searching for answers. Now, when people join the organisation, they didn't always know that. Gamification was introduced to help them through and teach them from day one, "Actually, in this organisation, it's up to you to make your career what you want it to be." What did the organisation do? Actually, they looked at staff turnover and they saw the ones that thrived were the ones that had adopted and became self-sufficient. The ones that left, and left quite miserable in some way, felt that they were left to their own devices and didn't know what to do. They were never taught that, actually, self-management and self-sufficiency is the way to success. That was the strategic input then, that basically made the company decide, "Okay, we want to apply a gamification strategy to solve this." Now, they did test out other strategies as well. What they came up with was, from day one, and I think it even started before, the person joined the company, they were sent access to an app. In the app you received instructions, a little bit like a treasure hunt: "On day one, please find X place in X building, and meet person Y." When they met person Y, person Y scanned their app,

Welcome to this week's a Question of Gamification. How to use our gamification card deck And this week's question is a question from Remco one of our clients who bought a gamification card deck. It's our physical card deck that we designed a while ago, to help us to explain what game design is all about. Why we made the card deck We use it internally but also when we work with people that don't like games, don't play games, don't understand the games or never had anything to do with game design. We also sell it to a lot of people who just basically want to level up their skills and practice their game design. So both audiences buy our gamification decks. For us, it was very much a solution to a need, because a lot of the time when I did HR workshops, and learning and development workshops, I had people in the room that actually admittedly said, I don't like games. And I've never played games, or only when I had to when I was younger, did I ever play games. In order to address that, and still bring them along on a journey, where they could actually end up doing a gamification design for their company, I needed a tool. So that's why the gamification design card deck was born. 1. Choose who you are designing for The first thing I always say is to find out 'what it is?' or aim your design at someone. Now for the purpose of my HR workshops, the other typical challenge was that every participants audience was different and diverse, which makes it really hard to design something together. So I needed the card set that would address that. So the first cards that I would ask you to focus is to pick your target audience: learners, employees or customers.(hint they are light blue, green or orange). If you are aiming at learners, you will use the learner types cards. If you are aiming at employees, you choose employee types cards, or if your gamification is aimed at customers and then you use the customer types cards. You only need the cards of the audience you are focusing on, you can leave aside those audience cards which are not your target audience. Let's imagine we are working on something for our employees, which means we have the green cards in front of us. Then we just decide, which of these are most likely to be the employees that work for me in the company or work with me in the company. So let's say we have the corporate career makers that work in the company. So I've chosen one card as my core target audience. Typically, I would say, you can choose however many that apply to your audience, and apply to the people that you have working for you. Because you have a lot of choice available and we're dealing across customers, learners and employees, one card from these 3 sets is ideal to start with. You can choose more than one, if you're already a bit confident. Once you have three different types all playing together, what I would say is consider having specific experiences to suit each and every one of those audiences, because what you need for each of them for them to make sense and for it to be good and useful, maybe quite different. So for the purpose of today, we have a corporate career climbers, so that's our target audience, 2. Choose a game genre or game type Every game needs to fit in a category. This is where you use 'the type of game cards' (hint: they are dark blue  in colour and have type of game on the back).  I've listed 13 different kinds of games. But there are many more. Mash-ups, where you put two game genres together, can work. What I would suggest here is that you can pick up to maximum two of the type of game types. If you're an absolute beginner, I recommend that you pick only one. The reason for that is you want to keep it simple when you start out. Because the game mechanics once you start mashing game types up makes the game more complex. As a knock on effect it makes it harder to create, it makes it harder to do many things. So imagine that for this purpose.

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host of the Question of Gamification podcast and the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation or aka chief game changer. Today's question of gamification is: what makes gamification fail? Now, first thing, one of my mentors told me at one stage when I was saying, Oh, I don't want to talk about failure, I think failure is bad. And I do, I do have some hang ups talking about failure. I think they're private things I do in private. I don't necessarily want the world to know, he said, "Yeah, but failure is, your first attempt in learning" (First Attempt In Learning =FAIL) If we look at failure as finding ways of how something doesn't work. Then we are also accepting that, we are learning. We are not perfect as we come out, day one, which is also a good starting point, because most of us had to learn the hard way on how to do something right and how things have gone wrong. The podcast this week, therefore, focuses on what makes gamification fail. Unrealistic objectives First thing, I would say is having unrealistic objectives. We sometimes get asked really unrealistic objectives. We want to have a hundred per cent increase in engagement. Oh, good. Well, and dandy, but what's your starting point? Do you know what that is? In most cases, companies don't know the answer to that either. So how can you then know that you are looking for a 100% increase in engagement if you don't even have a baseline? So be real, get real and start with finding out what your baseline is before you start asking and setting really crazy objectives. I'm all for stretch goals. I'm all for being ambitious. But I also want to say that in most cases, gamification has had a positive impact. It's not a regular occurrence that it results in 90, 100 or 200% increase in something. I find those numbers a statistically challenging to accept. If something achieves a 200% improvement then what on earth were you doing before? Or did you exist before? There is a bit of an element of cynicism in that comment for me. Irrelevant to the end-user What else makes gamification fail? Well, if it's not relevant to the end user. Now, that means that you need to get to know your end user. A lot of the time, people who start in gamification, (and we have that sometimes) we are attracted by shiny objects, we could have this and we could have that. And all of a sudden, you end up with a wishlist of ideas. Definitely, in the early days of our gamification company, we would have been guilty of maybe adding more than we needed. Adding way too many mechanics that made it too complex. And in some of our designs, that still happens and then we take them to user testing. And we find out that they're not responding quite as enthusiastic as we had hoped, or as we did, and that happens. Knowing that you are probably going to get excited, you are probably going to add in more than you needed to add in. That is something to be mindful of. And that is something that is also the main reason why you need to have user research and user testing as part of your process. Because that will tell you for real, if you are hitting the mark or not in terms of your designs. So I would say make it relevant. Understand your user. One shortcut to avoid some of these things, is to actually get to know your user better from day one. We're currently working on a project where we are not even sure that gamification is the right answer. Because the first survey that came back from the large user base is telling us that really, they are not interested in game mechanics, they're really not even remotely interested in gaming. They actually want the companies to stick with what it's great at. So we are questioning whether we should even add gamification at all. In our user research step two where we do more qualitative research, we're going to explore these questions a bit deeper. That means having a workshop,

Welcome to a question of gamification a podcast where gamification expert and competence answers your questions. Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this show and also the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation. Today's question of gamification is, what is hot in learning? And I guess we should also cover what is 'not' as a sort of balanced approach to answering questions. My interest in learning A lot of our work in gamification covers learning because my background has been in learning and development, instructional design, training. I've been an in house trainer and in house, L&D manager. I've also been an external provider and external trainer, a workshop host and instructional designer, both inside and outside of companies. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that I keep up to date with what's happening and that a lot of my connections are also in this space. It's also where we started Gamification Nation was with ultimately learning related gamification projects. It's also why I have a learning gamification framework, and a book coming out in the space of learning gamification, based on the practical experiences, I've faced implementing gamification for learning in organizations large and small. Chatbots So back to the question of the week, what is hot in learning? Well, one of the hottest topics is chatbots. We see tutor bots or learner bots popping up a lot more. And some of the large consultancy companies have successfully implemented chatbots that basically find the relevant information for you, based on the questions you asked a bot. Some are machine learning based bots, which will search for information and learn to present the good material, others are just simple bots with connections to the whole database of learning material that a company may have. Chatbots function very much like your search feature in some sense. They basically act as the Finder of all of these great materials that people may be looking for. Sometimes, these are only set to work on an internal platform, other times, they can also search online like YouTube, TedX, you name it, any learning related resources that they can get their hands on. So that's one thing. So that's definitely hot. I don't see it changing anytime soon. To make the most out of a chatbot, however, it does need to be relevant and come up with relevant information for your users. If it still doesn't answer the question the user is trying to answer, it will just be annoying. It may serve as a database or a bank of questions of what people are asking or looking for. That's one thing. But if it still doesn't answer those questions, it will soon be seen as another useless tool that L&D has pushed on us and nobody is using. If however, you are a company with a large learning database and you have the trouble of many questions relating to 'where can I find this' or 'I need a course on X and I can't find that', that's when a chatbot can be really helpful. Currently, in most organisations, chatbots are in written chat format, so they won't be accessible through voice on most occasions. But for the future, that is where we are headed, where we ask our Alexa or Siri to find those things. And the voice-enabled bot then goes off and looks wherever we wanted it to look. So the tech is there. how good the tech is, is a bit debatable, depending on the company, depending on how you program that to work, it will have more or less good functionality. What I would recommend if you are embarking on a chatbot project is to make sure that it also has a little bit of adaptivity and machine learning attached so that it can find the best and better recommendations for your users. If you can include user recognition in it, and you can link it to an adaptive platform, you're on a winner. And that brings me nicely to the next what's hot in learning. Adaptive and personalised tech Well, adaptive technology,