I’m tired so I’ll keep it short.
Will a chatbot just not play a role at all when it comes to the future of computing, or will everything evolve around the chatbot? I see both visions, and the first one seems far more innovative. Let me explain.
I fire up my computer and get greeted by a chat bar, just like chat.com currently is. Whatever I want to do, this is where I start. I want to send an email to a friend? I can write or tell it to write an email right from that chat bar. I get a new email? The chatbot tells me. I want to check the weather? I ask the chatbot. I want to plan a trip? I tell the chatbot and we co-create that route. The chatbot has the ability to call certain screens or maybe, using genUI, create those on the fly to, for example, display the weather nicer or actually show the route on a map. I want to see images of a place on that route? I get those inline in that chat interface. There’s no need for apps – there are only integrations through CLIs, and it’s all just there. And responses don’t need to be wordy; if I ask for images in the chat, I can just get them. The system is proactive: when it gets an email, it suggests a reply, asks if I want to see images, tells me to check a stock if it knows I’m into stocks, etc.
We humans are used to interacting with each other by text and words, so this would feel natural. As close as a computer can get to a human assistant, in that sense.
The other approach is way harder though: true predictive computing. And where do I even start? Let’s work this backward.
Instead of me having to ask for the weather, what if the UI just asks me if I want to see it? Or just pulls it up? What if, instead of me asking for an email, the email just opens ready to be sent? What if applications such as Figma or Final Cut just opened when I want to use them? But how, Fabian?
Well, predictive. We spend so much time on our computers that even if we think there’s no pattern, there has to be one. But how would it know whom I want to message about gossip when I just sit down at the computer? Well, because I carried my iPhone around and it caught up on it.
What the core interface is, though, when we look at this predictive model still remains open. Maybe it’s a system just like what we have at the moment, just simpler. Maybe it actually is a very flexible chat interface. Let’s see.
Good night.