AI is making Siri and Alexa quicker, smarter, and more like a prophetic little human in your pocket than ever before. Gone are the days of fumbling over your speech to get them to perform your bidding.
Promoted as possessing “life-bettering” logic, intelligence, and conversational abilities, the application pool for assistant positions has only increased throughout the past 12 months: Would you want a virtual assistant to help you study or to compile your work notes? One who can offer you advice on dieting and has experience with GLP-1s and nutrition? (Also noted: They are not licensed physicians). Perhaps an assistant more along the lines of Andy from The Devil Wears Prada, someone who can bring you the newest best-seller before the masses, send your naughtier emails, or even do those irritating returns after shopping?
Although a wide range of AI-powered applications have been created by developers, well-known tech businesses, and even social media platforms—such as study aids, image generators, and music producers—very few are promoted to consumer markets as aggressively as their digital assistants.
Digital assistants have become more popular among IT firms. Examining their actions and outlook on the future will be necessary.
Next-generation assistants could easily integrate with our to-do lists because chatbots have become ubiquitous
With features like text and summary generation, information movement throughout the Microsoft Suite, and a feature straight out of the sci-fi epics of our childhood, the controversial Recall tool can search through your entire PC history to find specific personal browsing queries, such as locating a blue dress you saw an advertisement for, Microsoft’s Copilot debuted last year as the go-to “companion” for Windows users, according to Mashable’s Kim Gedeon.
Windows services now incorporate some Copilot AI functionality.
During the same month, OpenAI unveiled a voice-activated, multimodal version of their internet-searching chatbot, which could react to queries and conversations more naturally.
Experimentally sophisticated AI voice assistants like vimGPT were able to perform multi-step operations across web pages, such as seeking flight alternatives and subscribing to services, a few months earlier in a test run conducted by WIRED.
The creator of vimGPT, Ishan Shah, told WIRED at the time, “I would expect the experience of using a computer to look very different in a year.” “Most apps will require less clicking and more chatting, with agents becoming an integral part of browsing the web.”
The former head of AI at Apple, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, expressed a similar opinion. Salakhutdinov told WIRED, “It will be so much more impactful if I ask Siri to do stuff, and it just goes and solves my problems for me.”
Recent demonstrations from Apple and Google showed their assistants processing text, audio, and visual input in real time and responding in a more conversational manner than Siri and Alexa ever could. They can function with any kind of device, app, platform, or other combination, and they can use your “personal profile” to virtually anticipate how you want a task to be finished. This eliminates access problems and reduces the annoyingly slow pace of assistant interactions.
That was just four months after researchers like Salakhutdinov and developers like Shah theorised.
Subsequently, Apple revealed its plans for Siri’s future.
The doorway to global integration are “assistants.”
On June 10, during its yearly WWDC keynote, Apple revealed a revolutionary update for Siri, which the firm claimed would make “the original intelligent assistant” more personable, contextually relevant, and natural. Siri can search your devices for incredibly specific answers, much to Microsoft’s Recall feature.
Apple claims that without collecting your data, it can use on-device processing to locate images, condense notes, and educate you about Apple tools and hidden features. Along with creating visuals, it is also capable of performing cutting-edge generative AI jobs like writing text-based stories. Subsequent features that enhance the original model’s “personal and capable” aspects will be added, the business said. Other AI models, such as Google’s Gemini, will also be incorporated.
This “new era” for Siri is a part of Apple’s broader “Intelligence” campaign, which is a more understated, internally integrated, and less showy pitch for a next-generation assistant overall. By integrating the technology into other apps even when Siri isn’t being used, Apple’s quiet AI assistant demonstration emphasises that the intelligence features aren’t limited to its productivity mascot. The business didn’t promote the updated “assistant” at all; instead, it concentrated on how it improved the tasks that Siri and Apple products already attempted to accomplish.
Other companies are also doing away with the name “assistant,” choosing instead to adopt more general titles that allude to their future goals and provide a wider use case for their users.
Using the moniker “AI Agents” to refer to the company’s foray into the market for AI-powered assistants, CEO Sundar Pichai introduced the company’s new offering at Google’s annual I/O conference in May. He clarified that AI agents are “intelligent systems that show reasoning, planning, and memory” and would have the capacity to “think multiple steps ahead.” Google’s agents can work across software and various platforms to optimize every element of your digital life; they aren’t limited to just one app or use.
The phrase “AI Agent” is not unique to Google. It’s commonly used to describe AI systems that do tasks and reach choices devoid of “human-in-the-loop” difficulties. This AI is taking care of tasks for you that, until they become available, you are unaware you even need to do. For example, Microsoft released its own “Copilot Agent” in May.
It seems that the marketing of this term, as opposed to “assistant,” is a tactic in and of itself. Investing in agents is of great interest to investors and venture capital funds compared to other uses of generative AI.
However, new terms are now beginning to appear. Head of AI Paige Costello told TechCrunch that the purpose of the task management platform Asana’s workflow-optimization “AI Teammates” launched earlier this month was to “create a mental shift in terms of how people think of interacting with AI at work.” Colleagues collaborate with you, not against you, to make more logical judgments and improve job management.
Canva, a design platform, stays away from role-based labels entirely, defining their Gen AI assistant capabilities with the qualifier “Magic.” Whatever name they go by, these assistants are being marketed as aids for a variety of industries—not just your house—including teaching, medical, and business ownership.
Next up
Future AI assistants, according to Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, will function more like a personal “Chief of Staff.”
It will have the ability to analyse your day, assist you in setting priorities, support your creativity, and help you create new things. It will serve as a research helper, but it will also be a friend and coach, Suleyman said in a CNBC interview regarding artificial intelligence’s future.
We are decades, if not centuries, away from having robot butlers that are artificially intelligent. According to Mike Pearl of Mashable, “physical robots only seem to bring joy to real-world humans if the human in question is named Jeff Bezos. This is despite the fact that technology has advanced to the point where we now have machines that can respond to simple written prompts with vibrant moving images of, say, fictional humanoid robots, or any other fantasy scenarios we care to conjure.” In contrast, most people’s perception of robots is one of annoyance, if not downright terror.”
However, we are currently living in and contributing to the era of faceless AI assistants. Unlike robots, this technology is predicted to only advance and become vastly more affordable.
(Tashia Bernardus)