The fax is the killer app to come

Let me start by apologizing to die-hard sci-fi fans out there. I cannot tell if this concept was from an Arthur Clarke story, a Robert Heinlein book, or my imagination. I have searched extensively but couldn’t find reference to it again.? This particular idea has stuck in my head since I worked as a product manager on TCAM and I recognized the possibility. You might be thinking I am talking about the facsimile popular years ago and still used in some industries. It is close to this idea but with a major application shift.

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I believe we will have very accurate digital assistants within the next 2 years. So, what is the big deal about this, what are these assistants, and what do they have to do with “fax”?

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The story I remember had a hero that had a digital assistant that they called a "fax". You could purchase different levels of fax. The highest level would know everything about you, call it your personal secretary if you will, and could make decisions in your absence true to your preferences. Lower versions reduced accuracy and took on activities with simpler results.

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The story fax knows your family, friends and contacts, your appointments, likes and dislikes, and has been trained to “know” you. It stays updated constantly. For example, if you were in an important meeting, a full level fax would answer the call, and if it was something of importance it would inform the caller that you are not available right now but offer some times that you could call back. If your mom was calling, it may interrupt your meeting to advise you to take a call from mom, and then link the call. If it was a cold sales call, it would determine you were not interested and say so, or politely say you will call back but not bother to advise you. Depending on your personality. A low-level fax may undiscerningly reject all sales calls, or make purchases as long as they were TV ads between 10pm and midnight. Depending on your personality.

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Why is this the next killer app to come? Society has all the pieces required to implement this with some important possibilities that fill what people want. A fax today could have access to your social media, calendar, personal information manager (PIM), and would be trained from that material to “know” you. Using one-shot learning, new information on your immediate activities would be added constantly.

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You have your social feeds: Instagram, Facebook, X (“formerly known as Twitter”), and even LinkedIn. There’re multiple calendars for work, personal, and family via Outlook calendar, Google calendar, and personal tools. Your flight reservations are electronically accessible. You have personal information managers such as Evernote, OneNote, Myinfo, and several others. Imagine training all this data as a hyperdimensional processing problem and you see we are on the cusp of each of us having our own personal “Jarvis”. A private, not-trying-to-sell-us-anything personal assistant. And, with access to additional personal IOT, LLM, and RAG created assistance from internet information. “Bob, what can I make for dinner tonight if I make one quick stop at the grocery store on my way home?” Note: can access Samsung camera fridge to see what we have at home, tie in to PIM notes on my favorite recipes, and determine minimum ingredients required to cook something in 45 minutes to allow time to eat and prep for zoom call at 9pm. Notice the additional intelligence of knowing personal limits that constrain the answer but were not part of the question. This is a real personal assistant.

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It's been noted publicly that Meta, Google, Apple, and X are all working on major AI projects or are scooping up Nvidia H100’s, and there are other technologies that can implement this at lower power.

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Maybe the top level fax is private, and the low cost versions are advertisement driven…

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By the way, if you do identify the story, please let me know.

This article reflects my own opinion only and is not based on any known work done by any of the companies mentioned in this article or any others.

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