Opinion
AI could herald a new digital era as apps give way to voice agents
Summary
- AI assistants acting on verbal commands can transform our lives just as apps on digital devices did. Early AI agents could fail but the concept has much going for it.
Last week, I watched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the launch of a product called Rabbit R1. At the end of the 30-minute video, I paid $200 and became one of the 10,000 people who ordered it on Day Zero. It looks like a small boxy phone, with a camera (called the Rabbit Eye), but what makes it special is the interface. Instead of a grid of apps which smartphones have gotten us used to, Rabbit is an AI assistant that conveys what you want to your favourite app and makes it happen (bit.ly/48SMEfN).
This is just not about a Siri or Alexa like voice-command. What breakout products like the Rabbit or Humane’s AI Pin herald is a completely new era of computing. No less than Bill Gates says so. He foresaw the era of the PC with a graphical user interface (GUI) on every desk a few decades back, and he is again predicting a fundamental shift in how humans work with machines—this time with AI and a natural language interface (NLI). Thus far, you had to learn the language of a computer to communicate with it and have it do your bidding; this is why we have ‘computer languages’ like Python, JavaScript, etc. With AI and Large Language Models, that changes to using human languages—English, French or Bengali. “To do any task on a computer," writes Bill Gates (bit.ly/3tSMNkB), “you have to tell your device which app to use. You can use Microsoft Word and Google Docs to draft a business proposal, but they can’t help you send an email, share a selfie, analyse data, schedule a party, or buy movie tickets. In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do." To put it simply, AI is the interface.
You can see that happening in another such innovation: the AI Pin. Launched last year to great acclaim, Humane revealed its AI Pin, which you wear on your chest and summon it when you need something done. There are no screens and no apps; to get things done, you speak to it. It is expensive, priced as high as a phone, and maybe it will not succeed, and nor will Rabbit. But what these products presage is our move from apps to agents. Apps are the universal user interface today, and they help us do a lot of stuff, but they are actually dumb and clunky—you need to tell them what to do, and it takes a while navigating through them. Agents are intelligent, and they do stuff for you. As John Koetsier writes in Forbes (bit.ly/48NUsA5): “Apps are an interface to accomplish a task, but the best interface is simply doing the requested action. Star Trek’s virtual omniscient ship AI didn’t ask Captain Picard to install an app when he asked a question." You can use an app to order a pizza, an agent will know that you want something to eat based on your history, and that you like a kind of pizza, and it will offer to order one for you. Bill Gates explains how agents will go farther than today’s AI bots: “…bots are limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences. Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions."
We can see the beginning of this revolution with Rabbit and AI Pin, and even with Microsoft’s Windows Copilot, which can boost human productivity. This profound shift to AI will upend smartphone platforms, much like these disrupted feature phones. Gates expects that natural language interfaces and agents will “bring about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons… Agents will be the next platform." As Microsoft’s current CEO Satya Nadella says: “It was about us understanding computers, but now it’s about computers understanding us."
ChatGPT and other bots, however impressive, are just the very beginning of the AI era. AI goes far beyond a technology. As Gartner says: “It is not just a technology or business trend. It is a profound shift in how humans and machines interact." The power of natural language AI agents will reshape Big Tech, fundamentally upend computing, and change our lives the same way that PCs and smartphones did, as we go down this new Rabbit hole.
