GenAI: Talk to me
Who would have thought that a black slab of Gorilla Glass in a titanium frame that fits in the palm of your hand would not necessarily offer the best user experience?
A recent YouTube video featuring Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and Jony Ive, the co-designer of numerous iconic Apple products including the iPod, iPhone and AirPods, points to a fundamental truism: using a laptop to ask ChatGPT a question, is actually quite an involved effort. In the video set in a coffee shop, Altman describes how he would need to reach down and get out his laptop; fire it up; launch a browser and then type a question into ChatGPT before the AI can then respond with an answer. The implications are that there has to be a better way.
Altman’s recent $6.4bn tie-up with Ive and LoveFrom, the company co-founded by Ive, was one of the hot topics being discussed during the South by SouthWest (SXSW) festival in Shoreditch earlier this month.
The Altman and Ive video suggests the device they are developing is unlikely to be some kind of augmented reality headset. During an SXSW panel discussion Megan Wastell, global creative director at Merlin Entertainment, asked the audience to consider a user experience where interfaces and hardware are less important compared with what people are used to.
Meta’s April 2025 quarterly earning call shows that the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram is making a huge amount of progress on its own novel approach to delivering AI for day-to-day use. Chief Financial Officer, Susan Li, said the company was seeing four times as many monthly active users of its Meta Ray-Bans AI glasses as a year ago. Rather than taking the approach of overlaying data to provide augmented reality, with the Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses, people use voice commands.
Powered by Meta’s multimodal AI model, it is designed to understand context, such as when someone asks: “Hey Meta, what am I looking at.” The glasses provide live translations for English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Li says that when you are speaking to someone in one of these languages, you’ll hear what they say in your preferred language through the glasses in real time.
We may not be seeing the end of the graphical user interface, but instead generative AI is paving the way to a voice-centric interface as Alan Reed, head of platform innovation at bet365’s Hillside Technology platform innovation hub notes. “We’ve used our phones for the last 15 years to do anything other than speak to other people,” he says. “But thanks to generative AI, we will want to use the phone button on our phones again.”