For those interested in the future, know that it is already here. At the crossroads of the simple gadget, artificial intelligence and augmented reality are seemingly quite banal sunglasses, which foreshadow the next great technological revolution.
Nobody expected it, but 2023 belongs to Microsoft for the time being. If the giant of Redmond had not developed since its creation in 1975 this annoying habit of self-peel of banana, we would have bet that this incredible success would stretch until the end of the decade. There, nothing is less certain.
But for a glimpse of the future that could be signed Apple or Google as well as Microsoft, just take a look at what the latter has managed to achieve in recent weeks.
To be more exact, it would be necessary above all to listen to him.
Bing bang
In mid-February, what rumors had been predicting for a few days was confirmed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: the automated language understanding tool developed by the Californian OpenAI lab to bring ChatGPT to life. was going to be integrated into the Bing search engine. About ten days later, Microsoft announced that the Bing application would in turn welcome this new kind of artificial intelligence. Better: Bing on mobile combines its own version of ChatGPT with a voice synthesizer.
Result: we no longer have to chat with ChatGPT. We can actually talk to him. And the version of ChatGPT that we find in the Bing application gives us with its soft, confident and assured voice the answer to all our questions.
“What is happening in Ukraine? “, we can ask him. “The situation in Ukraine is very serious,” Bing replies bluntly in the hollow of the ear. “There is a war that has been going on for a year and that has caused thousands of deaths and injuries. The UN demanded an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, but Moscow did not comply […]. »
You don’t need to broach sharp topics to have a chat with Bing. Weather or sports enthusiasts can not only ask this new kind of voice and digital assistant about the current state of affairs, they can reply in turn and maintain a conversation that stretches over several minutes. The AI does not lose the thread of the discussion until the discussion is over.
In short, Bing and ChatGPT in the voice version are also good for a quarter of an hour of small talk on the air of time than to summarize in 30 seconds a geopolitical issue in full evolution like the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.
Flea in the ear
Of course, stories of fear and horror will swarm the Internet in the coming weeks to illustrate how erratic, even dangerous, can be — the New York Times practically called her a psychopath — the AI used by Microsoft.
We often hear car safety experts laugh and say that the biggest accident factor in the car is about 50 cm behind the wheel. The same can be said for current artificial intelligence applications: the human factor is the greatest risk.
A voice interface, however interactive it may be, is just that: an interface. OpenAI and Microsoft give us access to information that was originally created and put online by humans. An important detail to always keep in mind when interacting with these systems.
At least Bing with ChatGPT in voice is nothing like the nasty automated phone systems that just about every big business insists on using to make their customer service worse than human. possible to be.
And this is where the next big IT transformation could take place. In 25 years, the Internet has gone from a network accessible at university and in certain cafés to a network accessible from home. Then it became mobile: you have it in your pocket. The next step is simple: we’ll hear it.
Augmented reality
It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the voice interface will be the gateway through which augmented reality will become mainstream technology. The technological giants all intend, by 2025, to put on sale glasses in which we will see content taken from the Internet.
At Meta (ex-Facebook), we think that we can order such glasses from manual gestures that cameras housed in the frame will recognize. We doubt it. The experience seems more promising on the side of a voice interface capable of dialoguing and then presenting related content visually.
These augmented reality glasses do not yet exist. In the meantime, this year we will see a new slew of glasses that connect to a phone to play music and make calls. One example is the “smart glasses” brand Solos. She sells sunglasses that perform several fun little connected tasks.
Solos glasses have the advantage of not costing a very large fortune: its entry-level model sells for $275. Above all, the Solos glasses have microphones and loudspeakers of sufficient quality to converse properly with an interlocutor or, in this case, with the Bing application.
In other words, curious people who dream of knowing what the future will look like and who have at most $300 in their pocket can discover it quickly and simply, by bringing together Bing, ChatGPT and connected glasses like Solos.
While waiting for connected glasses, and very probably overpriced, signed Apple…