Next AI Company Should Be About UI
While everyone is racing against each other for fundamental technology, we keep forgetting that a piece of technology is only as useful as it can be actually used.
Since Siri came out, I was not convinced that talking to computers provides the best interface. Also, listening to dense information is so much worse than reading. Remember the last time you booked your flight or hotel by phone? This is the experience we are heading towards at the moment. Instead of focusing on multimodal input, AI companies should try “multimodal” output (spoiler alert: this is so much harder).
AI agents can’t (and won’t ever need) to operate 100% on their own; they will have to communicate with us - ask for requirements, present requested information, give us options to choose from - and there are no reasons we should throw away all the learnings we got over years of making computer interfaces easy to use, clear, concise, and accessible.
Interfaces in science fiction are inspirational, but annoyingly impractical; we can do better than chat.