AI changing personal computing
I see three converging trends. First is the AI as a natural entry point: it is easier to ask/type a question instead of browsing through a bunch of pages of a website or figuring out the interface of an app. With the power of LLMs, AI is reducing the need to interact with legacy UI.
The second one is the OS + services instead of apps model. This is something that started happening ten years ago and has now fully blossomed: first-party apps cover all the core needs of a user, while third-party apps are bundles of narrow services.
Combining these two together, we may be entering a new world where OS-level AI interfaces fundamentally reduce the need to interact with any apps or websites. For daily needs, the AI may become the UI.
The third trend is in hardware. The wearable category is maturing, and we may see much more powerful combinations of glasses + headphones + watch as complete computing systems in many ways replacing a phone. And this synergies very well with voice as the primary interface.
Of all the players, Apple is ridiculously well-positioned with years of platform building to benefit from this paradigm shift. My guess is we will see a much bigger push for Apple Intelligence this summer.
The part of this push have to be empowering service providers to surface more useful data for the AI so that rich interactive widgets could be generated.
In the near future, UX design will shift from how an app works to how experience with AI of a service works. Similar to how search shifted attention to search result and landing (form search results) pages.
I guess we will be in a transition for a decade or two with apps still around, but interactions shifting very quickly to consolidating and personalizing AI. At some point, an app may be reduced to its settings screen.
I wonder what new ways of interacting will emerge from AI S-curve of adoption:
What do you see?
Next
Read next The case for the voice interactions that I wrote in 2018. It is a good read now, when we got the power of LLMs to hold conversation and emotional awareness demoed by Sesame.
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