Just spit ballin here, would love feedback/devil's advocates:

Impact of adding a 4th component

Excel monkeys like myself stand to save hours per week just on a single application. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine people using Word in new ways too. Rather than spend a bunch of time figuring out how to write the most concise blog post or memo, just ramble on as you would into a voice recorder, and then ask Word to convert your garbled mess into eloquent text (ChatGPT already does a GREAT job at this, it just hasn’t been connected to voice yet).

Programmers are likely to see the biggest change (and improvement) to their workflow/efficiency because they will be able to code without using a keyboard. ChatGPT has already transformed how people are programming, this will now remove the need for typing in prompts and copying/pasting results.

The less obvious

#1 - People are going to spend a lot less time sitting down in the future - or at the least they will spend much more time sitting in comfortable positions. Keyboards and mice require a desk to rest on, and they require a body in a specific position.

Yes, I am aware of standing desks. I have a standing desk and in the past had a desk with a treadmill track underneath so I could work while walking. But, there are a few problems with standing desks.

Standing desks still don’t solve the problem of being in the same position for extended periods of time. Sitting all day is worse than standing all day, but we weren’t meant to stand all day in the same position either.

People cannot “walk and chew gum” at the same time. For example, I know that there are certain tasks I can do standing up - like data entry or having a conversation on Zoom. What I cannot do while standing up are activities that require a great deal of thought - like writing or doing complicated math.

This will probably be intuitive to many of you - people actually think better when they are able to let their bodies move naturally. Sometimes we want to walk in a circle, stare into space, lean back in our chairs, or move our hands around. Using our voices as input will leave us free to move around in whatever way feels right.

#2 - Relatedly, using voice as an input will make VR and XR (VR + AR) headsets far more attractive. Apple may be the first to release a headset that you can comfortably wear all day, but it won’t be long until most headsets have solved the comfort issue. I have a friend who uses the Meta Quest Pro for hours a day - primarily as a replacement of his monitors. Today, he still has to lug the keyboard and mouse to his bed or La-Z-Boy - and even there using them is awkward. But that will change. Imagine being able to walk around using pass through vision so you can still see the real world, but having three giant monitors floating in front of you. You don’t need to carry around the mouse and keyboard anymore because you interact with the computer using voice.

#3 - Siri, Cortana and Alexa all get upgrades and start competing with Google search. Microsoft is integrating ChatGPT into Bing. Google announced Bard yesterday. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly on Twitter and in prior posts, Big-Tech companies do not want to let another company insert a product between them and how consumers use their products. Apple may be happy to let Google run the back-end of Safari, but they will not let the future “Voice” version of Bard or ChatGPT be the LLM based personal assistant that people use on their Macs or iPhones. My guess is that in the future when people use voice to query their digital personal assistants - the DPA will make an on-the-fly decision about whether to handle the query itself, re-direct to search, or do some combination thereof.

The biggest threat to Google’s search will probably end up being that the best search results end up mattering less than the user experience of searching. ChatGPT grew to 100 million users in two months not because it provides infallible results, but because it provides a unique user experience that is more natural by an order of magnitude than anything that came before it. This experience will be yet-further transformed by the introduction of voice.

On the flip side, it’s possible that Google - thanks to it having more data than anyone else - is able to create the best voice-based user experience. If it is sufficiently better then it may turn into their next billion + user product. Apple and Microsoft would both hate to have a Google product own the 4th “GUI” component, so they will invest heavily to make sure this doesn’t happen.

The only obvious thing here is that consumers will be the biggest winners.