AI Assistants are Already Here and the Internet is Not Ready

In January, Hop Online CEO, Paris Childress posted a video on our YouTube channel predicting 5 digital marketing trends for 2024, and at the time, two of them got me thinking about some interesting developments coming out of Silicon Valley, concerning the blending of AI software and tech hardware.

The recent high-profile launches of voice-driven, AI-powered physical devices like Humane 's AI Pin and rabbit inc. 's R1 device showed us a glimpse into the future of our digital experiences, albeit it in fairly limited ways.

The launch of the iPhone, 17 years ago, created a split in how we experience the internet, creating something like an alternative universe between internet-on-desktop and internet-on-mobile, which has only grown in time. The two threads of this split have since spent all that time growing further and further apart.

Meanwhile, two other elements were also slowly evolving in the background.

The first was voice-activated virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, which IoT enthusiasts and early-adopters have been testing to their extremes. Despite this, they remain a restrictive niche category and hasn’t yet entered the mainstream.

The second element was the moment generative AI became consumer-facing. In the last year, we have seen a huge explosion of interest in the potential of these models and many companies, governments and individuals are scrabbling to understand its impact.

Combining these two elements to create a voice-activated virtual assistant powered by an AI model (which is what Humane and Rabbit are attempting to do), unlocks the potential for a third internet: one which allows us to take advantage of everything our phone’s can do, such as order a food delivery, but without being trapped by the tedious step-driven interface that currently dominates online check-out flows.

The theory is that this new way of interacting with the digital world will allow us to live our lives more in the present, with greater awareness of our surroundings and the people who populate them.

This has the potential to give us greater freedom from our screens, replacing them instead with a simple voice-command. For example, just say “order me a pizza”, and the device will run the whole check-out flow assault-course seamlessly in the background, allowing you to enjoy the rest of your board game night.

However the catch (there’s always a catch) is that every app currently in existence was built specifically for users to navigate through them with their thumbs, not their voices. Furthermore, people have become used to these apps being faulty in themselves (who hasn’t had an Uber driver randomly cancel on them).

This raises other questions: how will the AI navigate the site if it’s running an A/B test on the product page? What if the company uses anti-bot tools, like captcha? How can you know if your AI-assistant chose the right pizza toppings or even ordered it to the correct address?

These are all things we will have to understand and not because everyone will rush out to spend $200 on Rabbit’s R1, but because OpenAI and Google have already built and integrated contextual AI into their voice assistants.

Their plan is to continuously improve them, so they can complete such tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible, without any mistakes that may cause a bad user experience, despite the command being given in a very loose and conversational (ie: human) manner.

This kind of technology won’t come right away, but when people realise how handy it can be, and all the kinks get ironed out, its uptake will be swift. And once this development hits the iPhone (potentially in just a few weeks), we will get a much better view of the impact.

So is the internet ready to deliver such a tall order? Not yet. But it is one we need to start prepping for.