already [augmented reality], [virtual reality], and voice. So, Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant; Samsung has its own [voice assistant]. This is the next fight to see who’s going to control. It seems like it’s just an inch deep and a mile wide, and it is, but because it’s so wide, that’s a big battle. That’s probably I think the most important [emerging interface]—voice.
What worries me about it is you’re basically inviting a microphone into your home where you’re bugging yourself. It’s an interesting question where the limits are between the human and the cloud and how much privacy we want to give up to have a terrific interface.
X: What do you make of AR and VR?
RW: I’m certainly no expert in that area. My sense is that VR is going to be an important entertainment medium because it’s immersive—you’re transported. Whereas AR I think would be more of a productivity opportunity because you’re augmenting what you and I are seeing. We both wear glasses. Imagine we were also seeing a decibel meter. We could’ve walked to the quietest part of the room [to conduct this interview]. That’s kind of cool.
The world’s getting more competitive. Certain jobs are getting more and more valuable, but at the same time, there’s fewer of them. People are looking for edges. I think augmenting your reality with real-time information in your field of view and in your ear, I think that is an edge. What is the right form factor, I don’t know that. Google Glass was maybe not the right form factor, but it foretold what will happen.
There’s a bunch of people trying to do direct mind control of devices. Maybe that’s even further out.
X: How do you deal with the privacy question, the microphone in the home?
RW: I think we’re actually headed in the wrong direction. I very much like Tim Berners-Lee’s comments in this area. What he’s saying is, hey guys, we’re allowing corporations to own all our personal data. This is even beyond whether the government eavesdrops. But just holding aside the government, corporations are owning your data. And that seems to me to be a big problem. The centralization of the Web, it’s anti-privacy. And more importantly, it’s anti-innovation, is one of Tim’s points—that you can’t have a thousand different companies creating the next generation of [machine] intelligence if it requires data that’s controlled by five entities.
I do think that we need to see people owning their own information. … I suspect in the end we’re going to see a legislative response which protects people’s privacy. Europe seems to be leading in this area, where they’re demanding everybody have the right to force a deletion of their data. … You talk about interfaces getting more and more intimate. We’ve just got to make sure we have privacy controls going along with that; have an artificial conscience, maybe, in addition to the artificial intelligence.
X: What did you work on at PureSpeech?
RW: I was the product manager for a product called Juggler. It was an early example of Siri. It worked through your PC’s microphone. It was a productivity app. You could say,
“Read me my e-mails,” [and] it would read your e-mails to you. Or [it could] forward your voicemails or dial by name—“Call Jeff Engel”—it had voice dial.
All of that was really neat. It was way too far ahead of its time. For example, [it was] running on Windows 95, so Windows 95 would crash about once a day. It turned out to be a really lousy solution for basic software that was like your answering machine. … Nobody likes phone systems that crash. It was too early to run phone on Windows.
The other thing I learned about that was when people have a choice between keyboard and voice control, they will always pick the keyboard/mouse because it is absolutely predictable and reliable what the interface does. Whereas with speech, it’s slower and there’s always the percentage chance that it misunderstands you. So, nobody uses speech when there’s any other choice.
But if you’re in your living room sitting on your couch, or if you’re driving, or if you’re in an operating room—there’s many circumstances where you can’t have a keyboard. Then it’s interesting to have speech.
