Can a speaker spell the death of user interface design?

The Amazon Echo is a Bluetooth speaker. But what makes it interesting, what makes us look up and pay attention is the way that we interact with it.

How? Not a complete novelty these days: you ask it to do something for you. Play a song, for example. Or tell you a joke.

Now, I’m not one to go out and buy new tech just for the sake of buying new tech and I probably won’t ever buy this one, but what got me interested in this device is the way it perhaps acts as a future template for the design of devices we interact with.

The design of the first computers were primitive. Users couldn’t interact with those devices like we do today. They lacked any real user interface, taking up entire rooms. Then our computers got smaller and smaller and with that came keyboards, the mouse, screens, touchscreens and our UIs became more intuitively and responsively designed.

The smallest of those computers, our phones have become our go-to. They are portable allowing us to carry them around everywhere. It should not come as a surprise that these are the UIs we interact with the most. It also explains why voice recognition came to our phones before our laptops and desktops.

We touch and swipe on our phones, but we also talk and the two don’t really depend on each other to work. As the Echo shows, you don’t need a (touch) screen to talk to a device. As our smartphone use before the advent of voice recognition shows, you don’t need to talk to a screen to navigate it.

So will there come a point when manufacturers make a choice between the two? It seems likely, and it seems likely too that voice recognition will win out. It is more natural to simply speak to a device than to input data or commands by taps, swipes, keyboard presses or clicks, and voice recognition opens a up a market for a whole new wave of devices. Devices like the Echo, that don’t really need a UI interface (or buttons…) for us to use them.

These devices may substitute portability for presence. Or add presence to portability. But a key feature, I believe, will be the way they utilize voice recognition in one way or another. I think there are three paths these devices can take:

1. Wearables

Example: Apple iWatch announced last year, Moto 360.

They will have smaller screens, connect to other screens or not have screens at all. They will feature lightweight and innovative interaction and responsiveness to gestures.

2. Anthropomorphic devices/robots

Example: Google’s self-driving car, Jibo.

These devices will interact with people on a more personal level. They will feel more like a companion or helpful friend than a device and will attempt to display awareness in how they perform the tasks you ask of them.

3. Ornamental/Ambient room devices

Example: Amazon Echo, Nest.

They will have a specific focus on the design of the object itself. They will be made to act as room furniture, complementing the aesthetic of the rooms they are placed in or adding some other functionality that will foster ‘smart’ homes or spaces.

There may be some overlap between the three categories and some devices may not fit neatly into any one category. But broadly speaking I believe this is where we are heading. We are no longer concerned with portability but increasing the presence of our tech. So that we can step in our cars and have it know where we want to go before we tell it. Or we can walk into a room and have it be exactly the right temperature.

Full disclosure: A scene from Interstellar sparked the idea for this post (Disclaimer: small spoiler ahead). TARS, a robot companion, makes a sarcastic joke that none of the other characters in the scene seem to recognise to be a joke. It then suggests switching a light on to indicate when it’s joking.

Our devices are going the same way. We’ll still need them, but screens will become more auxiliary. And indicators like Google Now and Siri’s chirp and Amazon Echo’s blue pulsing light will take precedence to show that we are interacting, that our input is being received.

The future could be a lot like the past. Something like a bell curve — with innovative UI design at its peak — is being created. No design interface to lots of design interface to no design interface again as we move towards technologies that that become more intelligent and aware. In the end we may wind up with mammoth computers that fill rooms.

Originally published on www.workspce.com.