What if the Future of Technology is in Your Ear?
My experiment with a $13 device convinced me that the next major platform will replace text with sounds.
“Why don’t we make cordless headphones?” I said.
It’s 1999. It’s cold. I’m sitting on a chairlift with my high school friend Jon Berkowitz heading to the summit of some East Coast mountain. We both have Sony MiniDisc players (an extremely short-lived era), and Jon wants to share a song. He’s picking at the headphone cables, trying to untangle the mess and keep his MiniDisc from dropping below. By the time we reach the summit, his headphones have knotted into a ball of frozen wires.
We can all relate. The hassle. The annoyance. Our headphones tangled with lint from our linty pockets.
Yet as a product, the headphone could be the sleeper technology of the future.
I came to this realization 17 years after my chairlift conversation. When Chikai Ohazama, formerly an EIR at Google Ventures and co-founder of Keyhole, told me about a $13 bluetooth earbud he tested (and actually liked), I went to Amazon and placed an order immediately. I’d been familiar with over-the-ear bluetooth earphones, but this was different. It was the first time I owned a small, wireless device that was similar to something I imagined as a kid. More exciting, was the possibility that this piece of technology — if widely adopted — had the ability to power a voice platform. Plus, did I mention it was only $13?!
I put the earbud through its paces and was pleasantly surprised.
The $13 EGRD was cheap and cheerful. I could multi-task with a stream of information feeding me while walking, working, or making dinner. I could leave my phone in my pocket or at my desk without having to constantly check it for notifications. I could send messages (though not as efficiently as texting) by speaking to Siri. I really enjoyed it as a piece of hardware.
I spent 14 days with the $13 EGRD bluetooth earbud. I incorporated it into my daily life as much as possible. In the mornings: listening to NPR, cycling to music, driving to meetings using Google Map directions, and “reading” articles using a hack shared by M.G. Siegler. At night: commuting home from work, talking to family, cooking to a podcast, falling asleep to music as my girlfriend lay in bed with no idea that I had a computer in my ear.
Yes, the device has its obvious shortcomings. The discomfort, the high-frequency buzzing when the device was muted, the poor battery life, the poor Bluetooth connectivity, the awkward click-button that was uncomfortable to use, and, more interesting to me, the awkward social implications where people thought I was paying attention but in reality, I was engaged with the latest Serial podcast. Even with its downsides, I began to love this little device for what it could be.
In that seventeen year gap between the chairlift and my EGRD experiment, the technology and design of buds had not dramatically changed. In 2001, the iPod was released with its iconic white earbuds. In 2007, Apple debuted the iPhone and included a remote and microphone. Bluetooth headsets were in vogue with cab drivers and fathers wearing silly belt clips. Stereo bluetooth headphones made an appearance on TV from athletes sponsored by Beats. But none of these iterations transformed how we computed. During most of the mobile computing era we remained tethered to our headphones.
But while the hardware failed to evolve beyond the cable, a war for our voice was quietly being waged by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
When Apple released the iPhone 4s equipped with Siri in 2011, we had a glimpse into the magic that could set our hands free. At that time, it seemed that voice computing would be the new battleground. It could schedule our meetings, remind us to pick up the kids, order tonight’s dinner, fetch information, make purchases, entertain us with jokes, etc. There seemed something magical about Siri when it debuted.
But something went awry. Siri got us all wrong. Google Now wanted us to speak in keywords. In the living room, XBOX failed to do basic commands like, “XBOX, turn on.” Amazon debuted Fire TV and voice search, which flamed out, only to be upstaged by Amazon Echo and Alexa. (We learned recently that Amazon’s amazing Echo originally shipped with a remote, but customers didn’t use it. Its ubiquity was limited by its proximity.) The prospect of a truly persistent voice input system, for the most part of this century, was not clicking with customers — especially mobile customers.
Maybe as a result of this failing, as we spent more and more time with our phones, our communication habits conversely shifted from a voice-based input system to a text-based system. Text as an communication input is where we are today and where many entrepreneurs (myself included) are investing as the future.
Each new platform begets a new platform. Platform evolution is rooted in how we communicate and with whom we communicate. The general consensus by technologists is that the next platform shift will emerge from chat applications like WeChat, SnapChat, Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Slack, and Telegram, which have been engaged in a war over this medium, luring developers to build bot services. Text-based startups like Magic, Operator, and Fin aim to enable services on top of these platforms, offering fast and easy transactions. But then what? What’s after our current platform shift into text?
For my EGRD experiment, I wanted to understand the longevity of “chat as a platform,” which many technologists and companies have said to be the next paradigm. I was curious to know if we’re about to leapfrog the chat platform to something else, like a voice platform powered by Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. If so, what might this look like? Could the next social network be created on an audio interface, like Anchor or Rodger?
This $13 earbud allowed me a glimpse into a future where audio and voice become the user interface.
An in-ear smart device can be more intimate than a phone or smartwatch. The device lends itself to a new relationship — not too different than the operating system Samantha in the movie “Her” — to information and the people or bots delivering the information. Over time, I found myself to be more “in my head” while wearing the device, thinking or having discussions with myself (or a bot) even when nothing was playing. At times this new intimacy was isolating, both from my surroundings and my activities. I eventually removed the device while cycling, grocery shopping, or meeting people because I simply could not focus on what was in front of me without being aware of the device.
As a medium, audio is truly more captivating and more difficult to ignore than text. It’s what makes the recall of advertisements in podcasts 3x greater than online video ads. I can understand how this engagement and intimacy could be overwhelming. But there is wonderful attribute about the device — if I wanted to unplug, I could simply remove the earbud and slip it into my pocket. That’s something we can’t do with our watches or phones because they will still buzz and beep at us.
We’re a quarter way through 2016, and entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin have called it “the year of the bots” — a statement confirmed by Facebook’s F8 announcement that it was opening Messenger to business bots. Indeed, I am beginning to see that we have the convergence of bots, AI, home technology, self-driving cars, and rumors of an iPhone 7 that omits the 3.5mm headphone jack. What is missing is a device that can harmonize these technologies.
As Chikai and I mused about our $13 experiments, we settled on the hypothesis that only the major hardware and software companies, like Apple and Google, can fully integrate an in-ear technology with our phones, homes, and cars. The user experience is otherwise too fragmented or niche (e.g. Doppler’s Here device).
I even have a wish list: iPhone 7 with Bluetooth EarPods; Siri becomes an open platform for developers (like Amazon’s Alexa); iMessage becomes an open platform for developers (like Slack, Messenger, Telegram).
By putting these devices in our ears, they become part of our bodies, a sort of permanent prosthetics that boost us bionically. Wearable computers can accelerate our biological evolution.
Yet, I start to wonder as technology becomes more personalized and intimately a part of our bodies, how far do we push technological boundaries? As a teacher commented when learning about in-ear technology, “At what point must I check the ears of my students before they enter my classroom for an exam?” The question to us, as technologists and consumers of technology, at what point does a device that is constantly on you — listening to you, watching you, and learning everything about you — cross lines of personal privacy, or challenge our concepts of natural selection, or perhaps fundamentally puts into question what is mean to be human?
What I’m trying to get at is that I think an in-ear technology will deeply influence how we — for better or worse — have relationships with people, bots, businesses, and ourselves. I am convinced that it will be a major platform.
But in the meantime, a $13 device can provide us salient insights about how we might connect with information and people. I hope someone gets this right soon.
The future is more [n]ear than we think.
Jon Li is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Snack and was product director at Vevo.
Here are some resources for background and further thinking.
- Chikai Ohazama’s “Earbud post”
- MG Siegler’s “Listen”
- $13 EGRD Bluetooth Earbud
- Design.Co’s “The Next Big Revolution”
- Johan Ullman “bluetooth” headset:
- Jonathan Libov’s “Future of Text”
- Josh Elman’s “Building Independence on top of other Platforms”
- Sam Lessin’s “On Bots, Conversation Apps, and Fin”
- TechCrunch’s “Doppler Here Review”
- The Economists “Bots, The Next Frontier”
You can also👂 this article. 😀
Many thanks to Dr. Brandon Schechter, Jessie Beck, Katherine Chen, and Chikai Ohazama for reviewing drafts of this essay.
