User Experience

We keep telling ourselves that previous voice interfaces like Alexa or Siri didn’t succeed because the underlying AI wasn’t smart enough, but that’s only half of the story. The core problem was never the quality of the output function, but the inconvenience of the input function: A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San

The desktop user interface is a mainstay of computing. Bread and butter, if you will. A pointer, icons, windows, menus and buttons, controlled using a keyboard and a mouse. Ingenious simplicity.

For almost half a century now, we haven't really managed to come up with something better, and that's not for lack of trying. This fact seems to annoy a lot

The second thing we need to figure out is how we can compress voice input to make it faster to transmit. What’s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut? Can I prompt Claude faster with simple sounds and whistles? Should ChatGPT have access to my camera so it can change its answers in realtime based on my facial expressions?

The same is true here. The future isn’t about replacing existing computing paradigms with chat interfaces, but about enhancing them to make human-computer interaction feel effortless – like the silent exchange of butter at a well-worn breakfast table.

Star Trek: The quintessential computer of the future. Touchy, talky and, er, video-y.

But we shouldn't build entire paradigms, or even just individual interfaces, based on the assumption that everyone else is using computers the same way we ourselves do. Most people don't conceptualize graphic design ideas or freestyle pretend corporate presentations. Some are controlling an industrial process, editing a feature film, designing an

That’s because text is not a mobile-native input mechanism. A physical keyboard can feel like a natural extension of your mind and body, but typing on a phone is always a little awkward – and it shows in data transfer speeds: Average typing speeds on mobile are just 36 words-per-minute, notably slower than the ~60 words-per-minute on desktop.

Saying “Alexa, ask AnyList to add spaghetti to my grocery list” is not seamless interaction with an all-knowing assistant; that’s having to learn a computer’s incredibly specific language just to use it properly.