Navigating a Day in 2030: The Power of AI Assistants

What does an AI-powered “automagical” life look like?

Future, ever-present AI assistants will help us do more with our most precious commodity: time. 

According to Microsoft President Brad Smith, they’ll do this by serving as our “alter egos”—knowing us more intimately than any other person in our lives. In their book The Future Computed, Smith and his co-author Harry Shum paint a picture of what a typical day in the 2030s, powered by AI assistants, might look like. 

In today’s blog, the next one looking at the Metatrend AI-Human Collaboration Will Skyrocket Across Professions, I’ll share an adapted version of that vision and also discuss the current state of AI voice assistants.

Let’s dive in… 

NOTE: The power of AI to augment humans, increase our productivity, and ultimately reinvent society is one of the core topics I’ll be diving into at my upcoming Abundance Summit in March.

A Day in the Life in the Early 2030s

Your AI assistant goes through your calendar and talks to your other electronic devices to plan your day while you sleep. With an eye on your sleep cycles, it wakes you at a time when you will feel most refreshed—within a window of time you've previously approved. It monitors your health vitals to make sure you’re in top shape.

As you get ready for your day, your assistant briefs you on any news or social media it deems relevant, outlines your meetings, and suggests the best time to leave the house based on traffic. It’s already ordered autonomous transport for you. Your first meeting of the day is virtual with a team from Korea. You take it using mixed reality glasses and join your colleagues in a virtual boardroom. Everything spoken in Korean is simultaneously translated for you without delay.

Throughout the day, your virtual assistant is drafting your emails, which are always near perfect. All you have to do is approve them. Your assistant has also drafted 5 reports, a patent application you’re excited about, and served you lunch and a snack based on what’s optimal for your current blood chemistry. As you walk into your home at the end of the day, the music is playing the perfect tune to lift your spirits. It notifies you that dinner is arriving in 20 minutes and suggests a fun comedy routine by your favorite comedian to pass the time.

So, how close are we to this future?

The Current State of AI Voice Assistants

For most people, their experience of interacting with an AI-powered assistant is through the voice-based assistants in their phones or home devices: Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant. These voice assistants are continuously advancing in capability, doing everything from buying items online and sending texts, to mapping travel routes and adjusting thermostats, lights, and locks in your home.

But all three of these devices are still rudimentary, in need of a major generative AI upgrade, which is no doubt coming. Apple’s Siri still spells my name wrong on occasion choosing “Pieter” for Peter, and it butchers the names of those whom I’m texting even though their name is in the address line of the text message being sent.

Regardless, I use my voice assistant all the time, as do roughly 72% of voice assistant users who deem their devices critical to their daily routine. As of today, Amazon’s Alexa is installed in about 500 million devices and Google Assistant is estimated to be built into over 1 billion devices and. Diving a layer deeper, let’s look at what’s possible in the short-term according to each company. 

Amazon Alexa

For Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s former Head of Alexa and current leader of the company’s generative AI development team, his vision for Alexa is for it to become “an indispensable personal assistant, adviser, and companion for anyone, anywhere.” Thanks to an AI powered by 30 different machine learning systems and featuring over 130,000 available skills, Alexa can perform a range of functions: control your smart home, help you learn about any topic, translate, give you reminders, etc. Prasad offers three more examples of how much Alexa has evolved since its launch a decade ago.

First up is “proactive assistance.” Two examples of being “proactive” are Alexa “Hunches” and “Routines.” With Hunches, if you leave your garage door open, Alexa can remind you and can close it on its own. Prasad gives an example of how he uses Routines in his personal life during the morning: “When I stop my wake-up alarm, Alexa automatically turns on my bedside light, tells me the day’s weather, and starts NPR Morning Edition.”

Next is what Prasad calls “What should I watch?” Amazon recently launched this “conversational experience” that combines Alexa and Fire TV recommendations to help turn Alexa into an entertainment expert that can help you find content you like.

Finally, Prasad offers the example of improving your shopping experience. Using only your voice, Alexa can now help you place orders, get product questions answered, and receive delivery notifications. Amazon also just released a new feature called “Shop the Look” that allows customers to browse beauty, fashion, and home products directly on an Echo Show by saying things like “Alexa, show me blue yoga pants.”

Here's how Prasad described the vision for Alexa in the next two to three years in a July 2023 interview with GeekWire: 

“Our North Star is to have the personal AI that is instantly available to you wherever you are and can do anything for you … this means that all the sensory data that the AI has access to [is] being used in the right ambient context of who you are, where you are, what you're interacting with, how you are speaking … And to me, this [type of] proactive assistance augmenting a reactive conversation is the ultimate vision of ambient intelligence.”

Google Assistant

According to the VP and General Manager for Google Assistant, Sissie Hsiao, voice computing is about to become more conversational by removing the need for the wake word “Hey Google” during interactions. Hsiao offers two examples of the future:

The first she calls “quick phrases.” When Google introduced its Pixel 6 smartphone in 2021, it released quick phrases, which allow you to accept or decline a phone call or skip an alarm without having to say “Hey Google” first. And now, on the Nest Hub Max, you can program a short command like “Turn on the kitchen lights” as a quick phrase—so that it becomes both the wake word and the command.

The second example flagged by Hsiao is “look and talk.” This new feature also eliminates the need to say “Hey Google” to the Nest Hub Max smart display. Instead, to initiate the interaction, the built-in camera will scan your face. For example, if you walk into your kitchen and notice a leaky faucet, you could look at your Nest Hub Max and then ask it for a list of nearby plumbers.

Why This Matters

In our last blog, we saw how each of us will eventually have some future version of Iron Man’s JARVIS. 

Whether from Amazon, Google, or some other company, we’ll have a copilot for our lives, helping us maximize our desires and minimize the amount of time we spend on menial tasks. 

Whether at home or at work, AI will become increasingly integrated in everything we do.

In our next blog in this Age of Abundance series, we’ll explore what a future beyond voice might look like.