In the near future, anyone who lives a connected lifestyle will be able to delegate their everyday tasks to intelligent virtual assistants that will coordinate, execute and simplify users' lives.
We will look back on these days and ask ourselves how we ever got by without our trusted assistants, the same way my kids ask in amazement about how we ever got things done before laptops and the Internet.
What Constitutes a Virtual Assistant?
You will soon pick up your phone and start asking your assistant things like “take me to live CNN news,” “send my dad the latest John Grisham book,” or “tell Adam I am running 20 minutes late,” and you will then watch it all happen. This evolution towards simplicity of interaction will reduce the barrier to almost everything you use your mobile device to do.
Furthermore, the device is always with you. The combination of simplicity, impulse opportunity, context, and preference will create the most explosive market opportunity in ages.
This will be a market in which every player along the line wins. Users will be able to click less, enjoy simpler interactions and receive much-needed help getting things done and managing their day. Participating service providers get simpler discovery, more transactions, and higher consumption rates. This then drives more data dollars to networks, fueling infrastructure expansion.
As proof, witness what a cool device called the iPhone has managed to accomplish through a snappy and simple interface with shiny buttons and creative apps. That one device and the competitive response we are now seeing has created a complete transformation in computing.
The Anatomy of the Virtual Assistant
The rapid maturation of technologies that enable free-form interaction such as natural language processing and speech recognition have vastly improved, to the point of gaining real adoption in many applications today (e.g. Google Speech, Nuance Dragon Dictation, Ford Sync for cars). Virtual assistants will leverage these inputs and begin to integrate them with conversations for a simpler, more natural way to get things done. This concept was best described by the late pioneer from MIT, Michael Dertouzos, who called it “human-centric computing.”
Over the long term, this paradigm will expand to many (or most) of the online services and tools we use to manage our lives like booking, buying, reserving, reminding, and scheduling. As we build trust in our digital “partner” we will put more and more onto its to-do list.
Trust is Key
Mark Zuckerberg is indeed correct that privacy is dead on the Internet among the digital generation. Hundreds of millions of people spend a great deal of time telling the world all about their personal interests and information that forms their “digital face” on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. This will only expand as the demonstrable benefits of this effort become more apparent.
The paradigm shift we will see with virtual assistants is that providing them with access to your preferences, tastes, accounts and more will be the cornerstone of the simplicity they will enable (within a very secure environment, of course). In other words, where we once feared how long search engines kept our personal information, we will now go out of our way to expend time and effort to specifically provide our trusted assistant detailed information about ourselves.
This will be done both manually and via syncing with existing sources of our personal data such as Facebook profiles, iTunes music lists, and contacts. The point is that you will make your virtual assistant definitively yours.
2010 and Beyond
The experience will be like hiring a new assistant that doesn’t yet know you, but eventually becomes so familiar that you can't live without him or her. Keep your eyes on this space, try out these products as they emerge, and prepare to make your life a bit simpler over the next few years.
As John Battelle has said: “The future of search is a conversation with someone you trust.” 2010 will be the year in which we start to see real progress towards this vision, on many fronts.
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