It’s Time to Embrace Digital Personal Assistants (Premium)

I’ve been slow to embrace digital personal assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Siri. But these technologies have gotten dramatically better over the past year. More important, they are indeed the future of personal computing.

And I mean that very broadly.

Without getting into the particulars of each assistant, I’ll just note that the situation is fluid. Each has its own advantages, and weaknesses, but each also changes regularly. That’s because digital personal assistants are powered by the cloud, and aren’t limited solely by your ability (or lack thereof) to update code on your devices. Which of these will ultimate persevere is a story for another day. Today, each is viable in its own right, I’d say.

In a small sense, I believe that these digital personal assistants are the future of smartphones, which is a shortcut to saying that they are the future of personal computing. That is, where we used to perform most personal computing duties at a PC, today we do so, generally, with our phones. In the future, I believe, personal computing will be pervasive. That is, it will just beeverywhere.

This will take many forms, but you can see the beginnings of this shift in home automation devices like Nest and Ring, and in digital personal assistant appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

The key to this future is the digital personal assistants that so many tech giants are racing to build out. As I noted in Playing the Long Game: Microsoft’s Cortana Strategy Revealed, these assistants are differentiated from the bots we’re starting to see in messaging apps and elsewhere. And this difference is important.

It goes like this.

Each bot is bound to a single service, and as such you will interact with many of them. But digital personal assistants, which are called agents, are bound to you. So they are truly personal. And you will likely just interact with one (over time).

Today, of course, digital personal assistants are still in the early growth phase, with each competing platform leapfrogging the others from day-to-day as we move forward. But don’t mistake their occasional lack of sophistication for an endemic problem. Digital personal assistants are indeed improving at a dramatic rate.

Consider an example to see why these ongoing improvements to digital personal assistants will revolutionize the future of personal computing.

Back in 2003, my wife and I had to drive over to East Boston to pick up a cell phone we were renting for a trip to Germany. Back then, you couldn’t affordably use a cell phone in Europe, and we wanted to makes sure the grandparents could reach us, as they were watching the kids. (And smartphones didn’t even exist yet.)

To find this place in East Boston, we used MapQuest, and of course we printed out the directions, so we could follow them en-route. In fact, this is why both of us had to make the trek to East Boston: My wife could navigate while I drove.

If you know anything about recent Boston history, you may know that we were then in the throes of the Big Dig, which is still the largest public works project in the history of the United States. Construction lasted for over 15 years, and during this time, Boston was a mess. You never knew at any given time when you’d be re-routed heading in and around Boston.

Which of course is exactly what happened to my wife and I. Using paper-based directions, and being rerouted because of Dig Dig detours that MapQuest knew nothing about, it took us about twice the expected time to find that cell phone rental store.

Well, it’s 2017 now.

Today, I can bring my own smartphone to Europe and pay next to nothing to use it to its fullest extent. Including Google Maps, with its real-time traffic and rerouting updates. Everything I just described above will never happen to me again. The world has changed.

Digital personal assistants are going to enact the same kind of change, but in a much broader sense. And that’s because they are tied largely to the success of the smartphones everyone owns.

Smartphones are different. They’re different from PCs, and they’re different from tablets. They’re different from watches and other wearables, too, albeit for slightly different reasons. But you get this. Smartphones are special.

This is why Apple will never duplicate the success of the iPhone. In fact, one might argue that Apple should simply take the transition from “Apple Computer” to “Apple Inc.” one step further and just become “iPhone Inc.”

This is also why Microsoft will never, ever regain its position as the primary personal computing platform. Microsoft’s past successes were all based around the PC, and its future is all based around the cloud. Microsoft will be omnipresent, sure. But like God it will be felt and not seen for the most part.

And yet both Microsoft and Apple, and other platform makers like Google and even Amazon and Samsung, see that the future of these devices isn’t tablets, and isn’t watches and wearables. It’s pervasive computing. It’s digital personal assistants.

So the next time you grumble when Cortana pops up a seemingly inane notification about buying flowers for Valentines Day, or whatever, remember this: What you’re interacting with is a tiny caterpillar that’s about to turn into a very beautiful—and very useful—butterfly. And I think it’s time to start taking this technology seriously. In many ways, I think they’re already crossed the line from “useful” into “almost indispensable.”

As such, we’ll be writing a lot this year about the best ways to do so. More soon.