00:00 Speaker A
There’s been lots of chatter recently about what OpenAI is working on in terms of hardware. Of course, they bought Jony Ive’s, who basically helped design the iPhone and Steve Jobs.
00:11 Speaker A
They bought his company. Uh, unclear what they’re exactly working on. I mean, you have Google making great strides with this new Gemini model. Of course, they do wearables too.
00:20 Speaker A
How do you think about competitors like this? and where do you see the next big thing happening in wearables? Is it more on the data side, like in the in the user face of the software, or is it the form factor?
00:33 Speaker B
You know, I I I’ve um, I’ve got a couple of different points of view here on this stuff. I I I think the glasses are going to be really interesting, and that’s because it’s an alternate surface of display and an alternate interaction.
00:46 Speaker B
You know, it allows you to sort of like the earpods that I’m wearing right now, to have kind of an interaction that’s that’s purely mediated by voice. and I I think that’s pretty interesting.
00:58 Speaker B
But I I think where that really ultimately goes to is that you still have the glasses as as some kind of accessory to, you know, a very, very powerful computing device. You know, and that powerful computing device today is taking the form factor of a phone. It has a screen, it has a persistent connection to multiple networks, it has, you know, always a a a good-sized battery and a lot of um, you know, processing power.
01:21 Speaker B
And and the devices that surround it are accessories. So I believe in this idea of a cloud of wearables that that are going to be maybe tuned to whatever your use case is. You know, when you go for a run, you know, maybe you only put in your earpods and and, you know, it it’s capable, you know, of of of managing your exercise or maybe you’re just wearing your your your ring and that’s what’s, you know, tracking your biometrics and relaying that data and storing that data for sinking up to your phone.
01:47 Speaker B
I believe the cloud of wearables is is probably the way it’s going to go because each use case is going to have some specific properties. Um, you know, if you’re if you’re on stage, you know, giving a keynote and you want to have your little, you know, teleprompter going through your glasses so you don’t have to, you know, look out into the audience
02:00 Speaker B
or at a confidence monitor. That’s a very specific use case. You might not use that every day. You know, you might not be asking the AI how to mediate every conversation that you have, but certainly if you’re giving a presentation, that’s a perfectly good use case.
02:16 Speaker B
So I think this sort of cloud of wearables is really going to be probably the way that this all plays out. I think there will be an anchor computing device that need, you know, is going to be thirsty for power.
02:29 Speaker B
I think some people would argue that it doesn’t have a screen. Um, you know, this that uh that voice will be the interface for everything and it’ll just be a conversation with AI. I think that’s a really interesting idea,
02:40 Speaker B
but I’m not so sure it’s true. And I think my evidence for this would be, we’ve all had Alexa devices in our lives and there’s something slightly
02:49 Speaker B
um, you know, there’s they’re fascinating and it’s wonderful to the idea that you could have a conversation with a device that’s meaningful as the conversation you might have with a human, but it’s also kind of latent. Um, you know, the sort of bandwidth for information.
02:59 Speaker A
It also sounds like a robot too. I mean,
03:01 Speaker B
Well, and you know, but look, I I’m fascinated by conversations that you have with with Open AI or any of or Gemini. It’s kind of incredible. It’s really it it is it it it feels magical.
03:13 Speaker B
At the same time, it’s not the perfect use or the perfect user interface for every kind of computing activity you might consult.
03:22 Speaker B
Now, it’ll probably be a lot, you know, a good at a lot. I think agentic, uh, you know, solutions are going to make it very possible for someone to say, you know, do this and it’ll do that, you know, book my flight or whatever.
03:30 Speaker B
But I don’t know that it’s the sum total, um, because for example, think about consuming content. Uh the bit rate of of reading and the bit rate of listening, you know, it’s almost, you know, a factor of 10 uh in terms of the amount of information that you can convey in a unit of time.
03:44 Speaker B
So so I don’t think anything goes away, just like the phone didn’t actually completely replace, you know, the the laptop, and the laptop didn’t completely replace the desktop. It’s just another form factor for computing. I think that’s where the device goes and I think that we’ll have a cloud of wearables that’ll be tuned to whatever your use case is.
