What does your ideal digital assistant look like?
Digital assistants aren’t exactly new. As far back as Microsoft’s Clippy, the tech industry has been reaching to personalise the human-computer experience (possibly further, but I’ve only had one coffee this morning and remembering Clippy was already hard work). Since then we’ve had the rise of Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, and more recently Microsoft’s CoPilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice.
At the recent Valencia Digital Summit event, Amr Awadallah, CEO & Co-founder of Vectara, predicted a future where AI assistants will be ubiquitous within five years. This raises intriguing possibilities:
- Personalised AI assistants that interact with other AIs
- Service-based AIs adapting their appearance and tone to user preferences
- A hybrid approach combining both concepts
I’m reminded of The Librarian, an AI construct from Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk work “Snow Crash”:
The Librarian appears as a realistic avatar designed to look like a stereotypical academic — a pleasant, silver-haired man in his fifties with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt and a loosened wool tie. This carefully crafted appearance is meant to make users comfortable while conducting research.
The Librarian demonstrates several advanced features:
- Access to the vast knowledge database of the CIC (Central Intelligence Corporation), which merged with the Library of Congress
- The ability to learn from experience and adapt through interaction
- Advanced information processing and categorization abilities that help users make connections between different pieces of data
If you could design your ideal AI assistant, what would it look or sound like? How would you visualize an AI working on your behalf?
