THE FUTURE OF AI IN GADGETS

It’s already getting increasingly difficult to pick up a gadget that doesn’t have some kind of artificial intelligence built into it, but actually we’re only just getting started with this technology. In the years ahead there’s going to be a lot more of it – most probably along the same lines as what we’ve got today, but taken further and further.

Take smartwatches and fitness trackers, for example: they already use trained algorithms to count steps, monitor sleep, take heart rate readings and then make recommendations based on the patterns in those data sets. As time goes on, AI will be able to measure more variables, and offer more insight into them.

Imagine your smartwatch telling you each morning the optimum amount of exercise you need that day, down to the specific stretches and activities you need to do. At the same time, you would get detailed advice on nutrition too, if you want to make your meal choices as healthy as possible.

Or consider the smartphone – they already have AI-powered assistants on board, but those assistants are set to get more capable, more personalised and more accurate. You can already ask Siri for travel times, but what if it could also book flights and hotel reservations, just like a real personal assistant would?

It’s not hard to think of similar ways that AI can be useful. Gmail already uses AI to prioritise your emails, but what if it could sort through and deal with them in exactly the same way you would – maybe pinging your phone with a daily summary of the most important ones? Many of us spend a big chunk of the day sifting through phone notifications to find the ones that actually matter, but imagine if AI could do that for you, without ever missing anything that you need to see.

The digital AI assistants of the future may be a lot like the Samantha assistant from the movie Her, voiced by Scarlett Johansson: able to interact with us much like a real person would, and carry out just about any task we don’t want to do ourselves. It’s likely that AI gadgets will gradually get more agency in the real world, making them more capable of taking action, as well as a greater insight into the different aspects of our lives.

There’s likely to be some push back against giving AI control though, as well as a better recognition of the limits of the technology: while AI is constantly improving in how well it can analyse and regurgitate text, images and video, it remains unable to have original or creative thoughts.

Many of the big names in tech are already involved – Google, Microsoft and Samsung – and others are rushing to join in. Generative AI is expected to feature heavily in iOS 18, due for release later on in 2024, and it’s going to be interesting to see how Apple balances the huge promise of AI with the potential drawbacks – privacy concerns, for example, and AI inaccuracies and hallucinations.

Given the use cases we’re already seeing, and the noises being made by the experts, it seems AI is much more than a tech fad. Rather, it’s likely to be an increasingly important part of all of the hardware that we rely on in the future.