Like it or not, there’s no turning back: apps and operating systems will steadily gravitate toward voice-first interactions.
Not mandatory, but inevitable
But here’s the thing: none of the points I’m about to make mean that you will be forced to talk to your devices against your will, nor that humanity is mindlessly yapping its way into a future where every publicly shared space will inevitably become filled with a cacophony of overly dependent, AI-loving nerds.
The GUI isn’t going away, just as the calculator didn’t go away after the release of Lotus 1-2-3. In fact, even today, you can still buy an abacus if you’d like. Some are actually pretty expensive.
But at this point, it is downright inevitable that both app developers and operating systems will increasingly gravitate towards voice-based interactions.
And there are good reasons for that, the most obvious being accessibility.
By that, I don’t just mean users who can’t physically interact with their devices, although that alone is beyond fantastic. I also mean users who aren’t as tech-savvy as you might be, but who have the same needs, as they try to navigate phones, computers, and platforms that only seem to work effortlessly for everyone else.
And if your knee-jerk reaction is to perceive these users as lazy, or anything in that general direction, I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re missing the point of the entire promise of modern computing.
Tech advancements are supposed to lower the barrier to entry and help people get to where they want, regardless of how familiar they may be with anything ranging from the Terminal to Safari.
In fact, most of Apple’s existence was predicated on that very premise, even if its leadership occasionally seems to forget it.
... continue reading