Is Apple redefining 'personal computing'?

Apple published a patent recently; the Electronic Device with Co-Located Independent Radar Transceivers patent (catchy title).

In short, the technology described in this patent enables a device (like a phone or a smart speaker) to determine who's interacting with it based on a combination of radar and voice signals.

This means that interactions with the device can be tailored and personalised to the individual without them having to sign into a different account.

To understand the importance of this technology, and it's potential to take ambient computing and digital assistants into a whole new level of shared computing, we need to take a tiny trip back to the origins of personal computing.

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The 'personal computer' wasn't really that personal

Originally, the PC was quite a social device. It might have been called a 'personal computer', but it wasn't that personal. Not really.

When I got my first PC, it was kept in our dining room. The whole family would gather round and look up things on the Encarta CD (remember that?). Or friends would visit and we’d play Command and Conquer or Resident Evil. Rarely did you use the PC on your own.

Then, as technology advances, things become cheaper. Tech gets smaller and more portable. We started to see the personal computer in other rooms of the house like bedrooms, then laptop computers started making the PC a little more private.

But personal computing, true personal computing, didn’t really happen until we got hold of our first smartphone.

The phone was the first real 'personal computer'

Today, your smartphone is yours. Nobody elses. In fact, I bet your phone is rarely touched by anyone else, but you. Your partner on occasion, perhaps, but it 99% of the time, it’s yours.

It’s so personal to you that you feel uneasy when you leave it behind or, heaven forbid, a colleague or friend reaches for it (which they’d never do because they know the rules).

Imagine how suspicious you’d be if a colleague just grabbed your phone and said “unlock that, would you?” 

We've gotten used to computing being more personal and less social compared to the days of the PC. But that’s changing due to communal, ambient devices like smart speakers.

Smart speakers make computing social again

Imagine that same colleague was in your house and they asked Alexa to play some music, you might actually thank them for it (unless their taste in music is terrible). But you wouldn’t be as utterly appalled as you would if they grabbed your phone.

That’s because smart speakers are communal devices kept in communal places. The living room is the most common place for a smart speaker in the UK, followed by the kitchen, then the bedroom.

As such, they're used by the whole family. So we’ve made computing communal again.

We still expect personalisation

But what happens to the deep, deep personalisation we’ve become accustomed to with our smartphones?

Whether you realise it or not, your phone is personalised to you. The apps that you use, the accounts that you're signed in to, the photos you've taken, the calendar you have, the messages you send, the searches you make, the videos you’re recommended, everything is completely tailored to you.

There's actually little value in your colleague having access to your phone, because there's nothing much they could do with it, aside from looking at your photos which, actually, depending on your style, could be the worst thing they could do! Either way, though, that's still not relevant to them. It’s not theirs.

The value of computing is personal

That is where the value is in computing. Your computer is yours and only yours.

When you make something able to be used by anyone, then, like smart speakers, you generalise its use. You have to. It has to be general things for general people because, as the designer or manufacturer, you have no clue or control over who’s using it for what.

The side effect is that it becomes less personal to you, the user.

The ambient computing conundrum

The conundrum with ambient computing then, is how to provide the same level of personalisation, and therefore the same level of value, that we expect from our 'personal computers' i.e. our phones, whilst still making access to all possible?

Back to Apple's patent

This is where the value is in Apple's patent. The potential to still offer personalised computing on communal devices.

For example, using this technology, it’d be possible for two people to ask the same Home Pod to play music, but the music that’s actually played is different for each user, depending on their preferences.

Now, you might think, what is the value in identifying who somebody is, just for the sake of playing personalised music? Isn't it just as easy for somebody to say “Hey Siri, play the Blackbyrds”?

Getting deeper into personalisation

That level of personalisation is surface-level personalisation. It's based on the use cases that are common on smart speakers right now, like playing music.

Once we build up more trust in these devices, as they continue to proliferate throughout society and environments, and we get more comfortable talking to our assistants and using these shared computers for more than just weather and music, we will then come to expect more from them.

And so if I want to add a note to Evernote, or take out some travel insurance or check my bank balance, or send a message to my mum, then I don't want to have to sign in to a different Amazon Alexa account or a different Google account or Apple account or have to switch channels to my 'personal computer' to do that.

At the same time, these shared computers could be used by my wife, or by my parents, our parent-in-laws or friends or colleagues. And so it also needs to respond to them, and offer them their version of their personalised assistant through one single interface.

That’s true ambient computing. And it’s coming.

This article was originally published in the VUX World newsletter. Sign up here.