LIFE LIKELY WILL CHANGE WHEN COMPUTERS VANISH
What happens when the computers around you all but disappear?
Tiny sensors built into walls, household products, what you’re wearing and perhaps your own body will make computers invisible to the eye, but responsive to a gesture, voice and perhaps your movement as you walk into a room.
It is still very early, but the era of ambient computing is slowly taking shape, whether in the form of the voice- driven smart speaker on your kitchen countertop, or via the IoT ( Internet of Things) devices and appliances that are designed to blend into the background.
It’s a vision fused by advances in artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and cloud computing.
Stakeholders include the giants of tech: Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Samsung, among them. But disruption also may come from companies not yet on the radar.
“The interesting ones will be… the Ubers of the IoT and the ambient world,” says Daryl Cromer, vice president of subsystemresearch at Lenovo Research.
No one is suggesting that screens and keyboards are going to go away entirely or that you’ll stop reaching for the smartphone.
“We still believe devices will play a huge part. They do certain tasks better than anything else ( and) provide a level of privacy, convenience and security that cannot be matched,” Cromer says.
But some of the features of our daily life may become computer- driven — without the tap of a finger. Imagine this:
Your autonomous car pulls into your driveway and the garage door opens, the front door unlocks and the lights inside the house flip on.
The temperature already is set to your liking and the ideal music for the moment starts to play, tuned to your very mood.
You’re reminded of a conference call you have to jump on an hour later and are told it’s time to take your medicine.
Invisible sensors, feeding your movements and routines into cloudcomputing servers where artificial intelligence systems absorb and refine the directions they give to the smart devices, will help make such scenarios happen.
Eventually, more devices and sensorswill talk to one another and begin to understand your “intent” or objective.
Amazon’s push into an ambient intelligent environment is built around Alexa, the digital voice inside the company’s Echo- branded speakers.
Google is pursuing a similar strategy around the Google Assistant and Google Home product line.
Apple’s path includes Siri, an upcoming HomePod smart speaker, and the company’s HomeKit smart- home platform. Samsung owns the SmartThings line of smart home products and has teamed up through its Harman Kardon subsidiary with Microsoft on a speaker that uses Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant.
Another goal is to make our exchanges with the digital assistants more conversational.
Machines “need to be able to look at my face and say, ‘ Am I happy or sad?’ and based on that decide what is the right thing to do,” said Jamshid Vayghan, the global chief technology officer at IBM Global Business Services.