The world’s 230 million knowledge workers are frazzled. Modern life is an interminable cacophony of emails, notifications, messages, alerts, feeds, data and information. 70% of us look at our phones within 30 minutes of waking up. All this causes stress. With multiple notifications on multiple apps on multiple pages of our devices, where do we start? Who will help us?
The Productivity Booster You Have in Your Pocket, But Probably Don’t Use
Almost all of us already have a personal assistant. It’s a piece of software on a device you own: the intelligent assistant (“IA”). We carry IAs around on our laptops (Microsoft’s Cortana), phones (Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Samsung’s Bixby) and smart speakers (Amazon’s Alexa, Baidu’s Little Fish). Yet take-up so far is low. On average, we still only spend a few minutes a month engaging with our IAs. Why aren’t IAs working better and harder for us? In part, it may be a misunderstanding of what the technology can really do. Most of us only use a narrow range of tasks with our IAs, and never branch out to more sophisticated uses. Because IAs learn from us, that means most of us aren’t “teaching” our IAs how to be helpful. Another reason for low uptake: privacy concerns. But IAs have the potential to help us in transformative ways, getting us to look up from our phones and interact with the world around us.