- The gap between technology and us will close;
- Seamless technology will be voice activitated;
- Your voice will be the mouse.
The idea that we stare at our phones all day is ridiculous. As time goes on, the gap between technology and us will close.
Can you imagine a world where you don’t have a phone, you have your voice?
You talk to an intelligent agent and what you want gets done. Similar to a personal assistant.
That’s what happened to computers. First they were mainframes. Mainframes turned into desktops. Desktops into laptops. Laptops became phones.
Now the AirPods. Today, they’re wireless earphones. Tomorrow, we don’t need a
phone. Apple is looking at voice as the next platform.
That’s why the headphone jack is gone. It’s not to cut the cord between your
phone and earphones. No, it’s about cutting out the phone.
Or as senior vice president of Apple's Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller said,
"It really comes down to one word: courage."
Or Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive got more to the point:
"We believe in a wireless future."
What happened to the mainframe will happen to the iPhone. Technology just keeps getting smaller, until it’s invisible.
Today, our iPhone is primary device. That’s because it’s more convenient than
any laptop. AirPods, not in their current iteration, but soon are the next step.
Remember when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone:
AirPods will change how we think about earphones. First you’ll use then for basic things like turning music up and down. Then Apple will slowly add more functionality. It gets really interesting when you think about a future where AirPods have cellular.
Then you don’t always need your phone with you.
This is the first step.
Voice is only now becoming a suitable platform. In the past, speech recognition was slow and full of errors. A study from Stanford has shown speech recognition is three times faster than a human typing and 20.4% more accurate.
It’s not like typing is a foreign thing to us. We all grew up doing it.
Today is Mobile First. Tomorrow is dedicated to speech. Look at the Amazon Echo.
People are warming up to speech as a way to interact with technology.
If you’ve got the Echo, you’ve got Alexa, your personal assistant. When you’re at home you don’t need to pull out your phone. You just speak.
“Alexa, play music."
And she does. Think about how you use your phone and your laptop. Most of the time you don’t open your laptop, you reply on your phone. But it’s nice to have a keyboard for longer emails.
But if voice is faster than typing, do we need the laptop? When voice is everywhere you primarily speak and you only pull your phone out if you can’t talk.
The iPhone gave the internet its legs. Before the iPhone, you were either online or offline. The internet was stuck on your desk. Now, you’re online wherever you go.
Voice will weave your every interaction into the internet. AirPods and the Echo are platforms. Not products.
We’re just at the beginning of a truly wireless future we’ve been working towards for many years, where technology enables the seamless and automatic connection between you and your devices. — Jony Ive
