Soon enough you will have your own technology companion.
Society is undergoing a user experience revolution. The introduction of touch screens into the mainstream has had a staggering effect on the world. If anyone was pondering if interface is a critical component towards adoption, the answer is quite definite.
Of course, we can also reach back to the arrival of graphic interfaces in the late 1980s and how they introduced computing to the masses. Today, we treat touch screens as a watershed moment, but it may pale compared to what arrives next.
This is the line of thought for Brian Burke, research VP at Gartner. In the future, we might not interact directly with applications, but instead see most of that happen through virtual personal assistants (VPAs).
He calls it the post-app era: “Your virtual personal assistant is going to be mediating interactions with different applications. It will act on your behalf.”
This will allow applications to become more specialised and cover specific roles. Burke sees VPAs interacting with those on our behalf – even intelligently. You may say “contact my family” and the VPA decides who you regard as family and engage the appropriate apps to make that happen. Hence the post-app era.
The Siri generation
Some of that future is already here. If you own a modern smart device, you may have toyed with a VPA in the form of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or Google’s Google Now services. These are often raised as examples of consumer-engaging artificial intelligence. But they are more emblematic of the power of cloud computing: whenever you bark a command at your VPA, it connects to an online network that crunches your request and delivers the best outcome.
Today, you can ask Siri to set an alarm or take dictation for a message. These interactions will become more sophisticated, but the main change will be the expansion of VPAs to other devices.
“The intelligence behind VPAs will likely remain in the cloud. That allows for a lot of different devices to connect in different ways. We might use tiny devices with minimum capabilities, leaving the heavy lifting to the distributed backend in the cloud. Rather than having a dependence on your mobile, those VPAs will continue to evolve and phenomenally increase the number of devices they can use in a basic view.”
We may have a main VPA closely associated with our lives, but also other assistants with different core expertise designed for more specific tasks.
“If you have a VPA that is your fitness trainer, it may specialise only in training. It may also cover health or liaise with a VPA that concerns itself with your wellbeing. We may be interacting with virtual customer assistants at retail stores, designed to engage us in certain ways based on that retailer’s profile of us.”
So if you are a regular at a certain store, walking in could activate an assistant educated in your tastes and whims. Such an assistant might quietly follow you along hidden speakers and screens in the store or channel itself through whatever personal device you carry.
At the centre, though, will be a true VPA – an alpha assistant, if you will: “You may have a more general personal assistant that is going to manage your day-to-day tasks: your calendar, interacting with businesses and other things around you.”
Burke doesn’t comment if such VPAs may even pay our bills, but with a little imagination the concept can go far.
A new digital divide?
This raises a concern: if we are to be so closely wedded to our VPAs – perhaps from birth – won’t that create a caste of haves and have-nots? Also, who would own it? Can babies expect to be Apple or Microsoft customers the second they leave the womb?
Burke admits that the issue of a digital divide is not going to be easy to answer: “It’s inevitable that we’ll have a catch-up situation. Less developed countries always have to play catch-up with technologies, determined by incomes. If we assume the nation states of today will exist in the future, I don’t think those governments from lower income countries are going to have the resources to help provision VPAs.”
In terms of who will own the VPA, he foresees two scenarios: “It could be a public service provided by the government or it could be a company-owned service. But in both you would want to own the data. Data ownership is really the key to this.”
So we may be able to hover from service to service, taking our data with us. Perhaps every citizen will be provisioned a VPA, much like an ID document today.