When I first learned about Siri, quite some time ago, I ditched it as an elaborate way to voice-control your phone. In truth it’s more than that because it sports some kind of intelligence that helps you retrieve and manage multiple kinds of information.
Now I have Google Now on my Galaxy Nexus, and I have been captured by its vision: giving you information and help before you even ask for it.
Mind you, so far Now has provided me only with mostly-useless here-and-now weather data, and I suspect we won’t see much more here in Italy. But that’s not the point.
Smartphones are a great way to access information quickly, and of course to communicate. What I can see is that they are starting to do things proactively, rather than waiting for us to ask them. This is something very powerful, and albeit not entirely new, the smartphone is the only way to really see that vision turn real.
Of course there are a number of privacy and security implications – turning on Location History on my phone didn’t feel right – but as it happened in the past, we’ll happily give our private data away in exchange for something useful. Perhaps happily is not the right word. Unknowingly is better.
The ultimate vision is the smartphone sensing your mood, how you feel, and what you need or want, and acting accordingly (The Empty Spaces comes to mind). It’s a bit awkward if you think about it – a machine knowing how you feel, perhaps more accurately than you yourself – but we’re definitely going in that direction.