What comes after the smartphone?

NEW YORK: To consumers, this week will feel familiar: Apple is expected to unveil new iPhones with modest improvements, including a slightly thinner one. Yet many of the world’s biggest tech companies believe that a radical shift is underway, and that it could one day make the smartphone, as we know it, passé.

Modern artificially intelligent assistants, which are far more capable and flexible than clunky voice helpers like Siri, are poised to become the central operating system of all our personal computing devices, superseding smartphone software in importance, experts say.

Apps and their polished interfaces won’t matter much when AI assistants use devices on our behalf, automatically carrying out tasks like making plans with friends, generating shopping lists and taking notes in meetings. That would spare us the need to swipe through software menus and type on keyboards.

“The operating system that you’re used to working with on a phone and the apps that you launch — the way that you actually do things — will start to disappear in the background, where your assistant will actually start doing things for you,” said Alex Katouzian, an executive overseeing mobile products at Qualcomm, which has made chips for iPhones and Android devices.

In the near future (not tomorrow), the smartphone hardware may even be succeeded — though not replaced — by a new all-important personal computing device. A pair of AI-powered glasses or a bracelet, for example, will be aware of your surroundings, and your assistant will essentially coexist with you to offer help throughout the day, some tech executives predict.

Every major tech company is thinking about this million-dollar question: What comes after the smartphone? Here is a list of predictions from current and former employees of some of the world’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon and Meta.

Smart Glasses

“Glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices,” stated Mark Zuckerberg in a letter posted on Meta’s website.

For decades, technologists have dreamed that a pair of computer glasses with digital screens embedded in their lenses could give people real-time information about the people and places they see. An AI assistant would play an important role on this device, allowing a user to ask for help by simply speaking to it as if it were a friend.

Meta took an aggressive step toward turning this dream into a reality last year. A software update for its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which include a camera, speakers and a microphone, brought its AI assistant, Meta AI, to the glasses, letting users ask questions about what they were looking at, from zoo animals to historical landmarks.

Meta last year also unveiled Orion, a prototype of glasses with screens built into the frame — so the wearer can do things like glance at information such as digital notes while talking to a person in a meeting. This year, Google unveiled a similar prototype of glasses powered by its AI assistant, Gemini.

Meta is expected to share more information about Orion at its software developer conference this month. “But realistically, smart glasses without screens, such as the Ray-Ban Meta, which has surpassed 2 million sales, will probably become mainstream in the next two years, while glasses with digital displays remain in the distant future,” said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst for Creative Strategies, a research firm.

Ambient Computer

“If you don’t have to pull something out of your pocket, it’s very powerful,” said Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices.

As reliant as we have become on smartphones, they can be a distraction because we are constantly being bombarded with notifications from different apps.

Amazon’s head of devices, Panos Panay, predicted that AI assistants would increase the importance of ambient computers, which include microphone-equipped speakers and screens placed throughout a home and gadgets worn on the body — a product category that Amazon has been building for more than a decade with its Echo line.

Because AI technology makes it possible to have fluid conversations with new assistants such as Alexa+, which Amazon began rolling out this year, it will enable people to get certain tasks done more easily than doing them on a phone. An example that Panay gave in an interview: prodding an AI assistant for the answer to a question during a dinner conversation, allowing everyone to stay focused on the conversation without looking at a screen.

“However, the smartphone is here to stay, just as the laptop remains with us long after smartphones became mainstream,” he added.

Smartwatch Reimagined

“An Inspector Gadget thing, where you flip it up. Then you can use that camera for video calls on the wrist,” said Carl Pei, CEO of the smartphone company Nothing, describing a future smartwatch camera.

As recently as spring, Pei believed that the device of the future would be the smartphone. But as AI has accelerated, he has changed his mind.

Pei now thinks there needs to be an AI device gathering information about people’s surroundings when their smartphones are in their pockets — what he calls “the smartwatch reimagined”.

Why? The smartwatch, popularised with the Apple Watch, is familiar. More than 100 million are sold each year. It’s unobtrusive. It sits on the wrist, not the face. And it’s always present.

AI would make the operating system on each person’s watch unique. For fitness enthusiasts, it would automatically track their activity. For entrepreneurs focused on work, like Pei, it would automate scheduling and other tasks.

“Today, computing is very manual,” Pei said. “Getting coffee with a friend could involve juggling three apps for messaging, a calendar and Yelp reviews. The AI agents on a watch would automatically do that in the future.”

The Recorder

“It is a device that augments our capabilities and frees our mind of our biological limitations,” opined Dan Siroker, CEO of Limitless AI, a wearable AI start-up that has raised more than $33 million from investors including OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Human memory is extremely unreliable — studies have shown that 90% of our memories are forgotten after a week. (Or maybe it was 80%.) What if people could have perfect memory?

Start-ups like Limitless AI, which makes an AI pendant that clips to your clothing to record conversations and create automatic transcripts, believe that wearable recorders paired with an AI coach will give people extra brain power to be more effective at work and at home. This AI assistant, always listening to your conversations, could remind you that you forgot to deliver something that you promised to a colleague the other day.

“Privacy concerns could slow the adoption of AI devices carried everywhere,” said Dave Evans, a hardware designer who previously worked at Apple and Samsung. “Always-listening computers are a more natural fit in an office, where workers have already given up privacy on computers being monitored by their employers.”

All of these wearable device makers are building toward a future similar to the one Bob Ryskamp, a software designer, envisioned when he worked on the Google Glass headset a decade ago. At the time, he imagined people putting on a handful of fashionable devices every morning, like a necklace, a smartwatch and glasses that he said would be tied together by “a symphony of AI”.

“You wear them because, each of these things, you like how they look, and they also happen to be smart,” Ryskamp said.

Google Glass, of course, was a notorious flop in large part because it looked so ugly, which is no longer the case with today’s wearable AI computers.