Exploring the ‘Whisperverse’: The Role of AI Voice Assistants in Daily Life

Big tech has often been criticized for treating its users as mere commodities for targeted ads. However, this is about to change. Not because tech platforms are becoming less aggressive, but because our ears are about to become the prime target for AI-powered influence that responds to our environment. Welcome to the era of the Whisperverse.

In the near future, an AI-powered voice will become your constant companion, whispering guidance throughout your day. It will remind you to pick up your dry cleaning, help you locate your parked car, and even prompt you with the name of a colleague you pass in the hallway. It might even coach you during conversations, providing you with witty remarks and interesting facts to make you appear more charming and intelligent. These enhancements will feel like superpowers.

The ‘Whisperverse’ and the Need for Advanced Technology

But you won’t be the only one with this AI-powered guidance. Everyone else will have similar capabilities, leading to a race to adopt the latest AI enhancements. Not having these capabilities will put you at a cognitive disadvantage. This is the future of mobile computing, transforming our handheld devices into body-worn gadgets that perceive our surroundings and provide useful information and reminders at every turn.

Most of these devices will take the form of AI-powered glasses, offering the best vantage point for cameras to monitor our field of view. However, camera-enabled earbuds will also be available. The glasses will also display visual content, allowing the AI to provide silent assistance in the form of text, images, and immersive elements integrated into our world. Additionally, sensor-equipped glasses and earbuds will enable us to respond to our AI assistants with simple head nods, just as we do with other people.

This future is the result of the maturation and convergence of two technologies — AI and augmented reality. Their combination will enable AI assistants to become an integral part of our lives, providing advice so useful that we will quickly feel we can’t live without it. However, this comes with serious privacy concerns and the risk of AI-powered persuasion and manipulation. But when big tech starts selling superpowers, not having these abilities will mean being at a disadvantage socially, professionally, intellectually, and economically.

How ‘Augmented Mentality’ is Transforming Our Lives

I’ve been exploring our augmented future for over 30 years, first as a researcher at Stanford, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force, and then as a professor and entrepreneur. When I first started working in the field we now call “augmented reality,” that phrase didn’t exist, so I described the concept as “perceptual overlays” and demonstrated for the first time that AR could significantly enhance human abilities. Today, there is a similar lack of words to describe the AI-powered entities that will accompany us throughout our day. I often refer to this emerging branch of computing as “augmented mentality” because it will change how we think, feel, and act.

No matter what we end up calling this new field, it is coming soon and it will mediate our lives, assisting us at work, at school, or even when grabbing a late-night snack in the privacy of our own kitchen. If you are skeptical, you’ve not been tracking the massive investment and rapid progress made by Meta on this front and the arms race they are stoking with Apple, Google, Samsung, and other major players in the mobile market. It is increasingly clear that by 2027, this will become a major battleground in the mobile device industry.

The first of these devices is already on the market — the AI-powered Ray-Bans from Meta. Although currently a niche product, I believe it is the single most important mobile device being sold today. That’s because it follows the new paradigm that will soon define mobile computing: Context aware guidance. To enable this, the Meta Ray-Bans have onboard cameras and mics that feed a powerful AI engine and pumps verbal guidance into your ears. At Meta Connect in September, the company showcased new consumer-focused features for these glasses, such as helping users find their parked cars, translating languages in real-time, and naturally answering questions about things you see in front of you.

From ‘Creepy’ to ‘Cute’ AI Companions

Of course, the Meta Ray-Bans are just a first step. The next step is to visually enhance your experience as you navigate your world. Also in September, Meta unveiled their prototype Orion glasses that deliver high quality visual content in a form factor that is finally reasonable to wear in public. The Orion device is not planned for commercial deployment, but it paves the way for consumer versions to follow.

So, where is this all headed? By the early 2030’s, I predict the convergence of AI and augmented reality will be sufficiently refined that AI assistants will appear as photorealistic avatars that are embodied within our field of view. No, I don’t believe they will be displayed as human-sized virtual assistants who follow us around all day. That would be creepy. Instead, I predict they will be rendered as cute little creatures that fly out in front of us, guiding us and informing us within our surroundings.

In 2020, I wrote a short story (Carbon Dating) for a sci-fi anthology in which I refer to these AI assistants as Electronic Life Facilitators, or ELFs for short. I like thinking of these AI-powered entities as elves because that is what they will become in our lives — helpful little creatures that prompt you with the exact cargo capacity of a railcar when you just can’t remember in an important meeting, or takes the shape of a flying fairy that guides you through Costco to find the items on your shopping list as efficiently as possible. These features will not just be helpful, they will make our lives seem magical.

However, the deployment of intelligent systems that whisper in your ears throughout your day could easily be abused as a dangerous form of targeted influence. Coupled with the ability to visually modify the world around you, AI/AR powered glasses could enable the most powerful tools of persuasion and manipulation ever created. For these reasons, I sincerely hope that industry leaders do not adopt an advertising business model when commercializing these AI-powered glasses. I also hope they consider how these products will shake-up social dynamics, as they can change how people interact face-to-face in damaging ways (the short film Privacy Lost shows examples).

For three decades, I’ve researched how AR and AI can enhance human abilities in positive ways. However, the last thing I want is for giant corporations to compete for marketing dollars based on how efficiently their AI assistants can persuade me to buy things I don’t need or believe things that aren’t true. To enable the magical benefits while protecting our privacy and agency, I recommend that regulators quickly focus on this emerging market. Their goal should be to define the playing field so that big tech can compete on how magical they make your life, not how effectively they can influence it.

Louis Rosenberg is a renowned computer scientist in the fields of AR and AI. He is the founder of Immersion Corp, Outland Research, and Unanimous AI.