I’m still thinking plenty about this collaboration between ChatGPT and Jony Ive. The Frontier Model LLMs are a revolutionary technology, but perhaps there is a new hardware paradigm for using them we haven’t seen yet.

Still, I think it’s going to be hard for people to give up their screens, but clearly that’s exactly what Altman and Ive are looking for. I do believe the paradigm of voice computing is underrated. We’re all so used to our keyboards and screens. It’s hard to imagine a world where your primary interface is your voice.

I’ve always been a fan of dictation, so voice computing makes more sense to me than it does to most people. But we never really had the technology to explore it fully until recently, and yet we still really haven’t gone very far in that experimentation.

Personally, I’ve been trying to work more with the ChatGPT and Gemini voice interfaces just to explore the rough edges of a future that is more based in voice computing, and I’m finding it more useful than I thought it would be, even at this early stage.

One of the best uses is as a thought partner, where I can talk about something I’m thinking about, writing about, or working on, and ask for constructive criticism of the idea. The voice interface will point out flaws in logic and thought in a way that is way more fluid than it would be with a keyboard and screen.

Granted there are still vast swaths of my computing that wouldn’t make sense with this paradigm, but what if it could evolve? Several years ago, there was a movie called Her, where the protagonist fell in love with his AI operating system, which seemed silly at the time, but now not so much so.

What’s interesting, however, was the hardware he used was just a little earbud. That was his computer. It talked to just him, and he talked back to it, and it handled the administrative details of his life. I could easily see such a computing interface becoming common in the not-so-distant future.