The collaboration of these tools will be key to the success of this concept, says Leo Gebbie, an analyst who covers connected devices at CCS Insight. “Instead of having this kind of disjointed experience where certain apps use AI in certain ways, you want AI to be the overarching tool that gives you the ability to instantly get everything from an app, an experience or a piece of content to search through these things.”
When the pieces fit together, the idea sounds like a dream. Imagine being able to ask your digital assistant, “Hey, who was that guy I talked to last week who had the really good ramen recipe?” and then leave it with a name, a summary of the conversation and spit out a place where all the ingredients can be found.
“For people like me who don’t remember anything and have to write everything down, this will be great,” Moorhead says.
And there’s also the tricky matter of keeping all that personal information secret.
“If you think about it for half a second, the most important problem is not recording or transcribing, but solving the privacy problem,” says Gruber. “If we start getting memory apps or reminder apps or whatever, then we need a broader understanding of this idea of consent.”
Despite his own enthusiasm for the idea of personal assistants, Gruber says there’s a danger that people are a little too willing to let their AI assistants help (and monitor) everything. He advocates for encrypted, private services that are not linked to a cloud service – or, if so, those that can only be accessed with an encryption key stored on a user’s device. According to Gruber, the risk is a kind of Facebook adaptation of AI assistants, in which users are attracted by the user-friendliness but are not largely aware of the privacy implications until later.
“Consumers should be asked to resist,” says Gruber. “They should be taught to be very, very suspicious of things that already look like that and to feel the creep factor.”
Your phone is already sucking up all the data it can get from you, from your location to your shopping habits to the Instagram accounts you double-tap most often. Not to mention, in the past, people have tended to prioritize convenience over security when introducing new technologies.
“The hurdles and barriers here are probably much lower than people think,” says Gebbie. “We’ve seen how quickly people embrace and adopt technologies that make their lives easier.”
Because here too there is real potential for improvement. The ability to actually interact with and benefit from all the information collected could even take some of the pressure off years of snooping by app and device manufacturers.
“If your phone is already collecting this data and is currently just collecting it and using it to deliver advertising, is there any benefit in that this actually gives you some of the benefit back?” says Gebbie. “You also get the ability to access this data and get useful metrics. Maybe this is a really useful thing.”
That’s like picking up an umbrella after someone just stole all your clothes, but if companies can stick the landing and get these AI assistants up and running, then the conversation could be over Rather, data collection focuses on how to approach it responsibly and in a way that offers real benefit.
The future isn’t exactly bright because we still have to trust the companies that ultimately decide which parts of our digitally captured lives appear relevant. Memory may be a fundamental part of cognition, but the next step beyond that is intentionality. It’s one thing for AI to remember everything we do, but another to decide what information is important to us later.
“We can get so much performance and great benefit from personal AI,” says Gruber. However, he warns: “The benefit is so great that it should be morally imperative that we choose the right thing, that we get one that protects privacy and is secure and that is done right.” Please, that’s ours Chance. If it is only done in a free and non-private way, we miss a golden opportunity to do this the right way.”