I have a confession to make: since its launch a couple of months ago, I now often engage in long “talks” with AI pioneer ChatGPT’s new conversational voice tool, known as advanced voice mode.
It’s available on a $20 a month ChatGPT Plus subscription, and I use it mainly to thrash out ideas — a bit like throwing things against the proverbial wall to see what sticks. I also use it to learn about new topics I’m interested in.
And it’s made me realise that the next big interface in computing will be voice. It will be far bigger and more consequential in the short to medium term than the virtual and augmented reality solutions Silicon Valley giants such as Apple and Meta are racing to develop.
A melding of voice recognition tools and AI is going to transform the way humans interact with computers. Voice interaction with software will become a ubiquitous part of everyday life — much more so than with today’s relatively backward voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. These voice assistants are about to get a huge, AI-infused upgrade that will transform the way we interact with online information and services.
Apple has already started rolling out more advanced AI into Siri, with major updates to the platform expected in the coming months. Amazon, meanwhile, is readying a long-awaited upgrade to Alexa, which next year will get AI smarts from Anthropic’s Claude suite of large language models. Google has spent the past year infusing AI into Google Assistant through Gemini. The race is on between these tech giants to define this next era in computing.
But it’s a new (to me) software tool called Otter.ai that has me particularly excited about the potential for voice-based computing. Founded in 2016 by AI experts Sam Liang and Yun Fu, Otter is transforming the way I work. It’s like a second brain that’s helped lift my productivity. It has a generous free tier to explore, too.
So far, I use Otter in two ways:
- As an AI assistant, note-taker and transcription service in Microsoft Teams and Zoom. After a meeting’s done, Otter provides not only a transcription, but also an AI-generated summary of the meeting, along with action points. It even allows me to query it with specific questions about the meeting, such as clarifying points raised. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s already remarkably accurate and useful, and will only improve with time. I can even send it to meetings I don’t have time to attend, getting a summary after the fact that I can read and interrogate with questions.
- As a way of noting ideas. I often get ideas for articles at the most inopportune times, such as when I’m out hiking. Instead of looking for my laptop or a notepad, I now simply fire up the Otter.ai app and communicate my thoughts to it using my voice, and it transcribes and files them for future use. As a result, I never forget an idea.
Otter.ai is transforming the way I work. It’s like a second brain that’s helped lift my productivity
But it’s in the fusion of AI-powered voice tools and robotics, a field that is also advancing rapidly, where things could get particularly interesting later this decade — and into the 2030s. As AI chatbots get better at humanlike conversation, embedding them in robots seems an obvious next step.
There is already talk that Apple is working on a prototype AI-powered home robot in its labs. Reports have suggested that Apple sees home robotics as a potential major new product category, and the company is said to be building something for launch by 2027 that costs about the same as an iPhone, or about $1,000. It will be limited in scope — perhaps a multifunction tabletop device of some kind initially — but progress is likely to be rapid.
A mobile robot that follows its users about is reportedly also in the skunk works phase in Apple’s labs, with journalist Mark Gurman suggesting in an April report for Bloomberg that the company has even explored building a robot that can do household chores such as washing dishes.
That level of tech is unlikely to arrive this decade due to “extraordinarily difficult engineering challenges”: the first generation of the Apple robot is more likely to be a mobile virtual assistant that also provides home security monitoring, according to Gurman.
Still, the outlook is exciting. The next decade in computing is starting to come into clearer view, and it’s going to be driven in part by voice-based, human-machine interaction and stunning advancements in AI and robotics.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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