Smartphone addiction has become a thing. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will weigh in at its annual developer conference today with an app for that called Digital Health. It’s a set of tools in Settings that tell people how much time they’ve spent on other apps.
If Digital Health sounds familiar, you have heard of Siempo, an app introduced at last month’s Google I/O from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) — It does much the same thing.
Or you could buy a different phone, like the German Billoc that tiles your favorite apps on its home screen, in black, and deliberately lacks a front-facing camera. Basically, what I’m saying is that smartphones are seen as a digital drug. The media and parents around the country nod their heads in agreement.
But are smartphones really addictive? If they are, is there an opportunity in it? There is, and it’s at the heart of what I call the Great Game.
Down With Facebook
The Great Game is the fight among industry leaders at the bleeding edge of technology. In the 1980s this revolved around point-and-click interfaces. A decade ago it involved smartphone interfaces.
The company that wins the Great Game can dominate the next decade. Microsoft won it in the 1990s. Apple won it in the last decade. Today the competitors are the Cloud Czars — Apple, Google, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB). Voice interfaces are the battlefield.
Most of today’s addiction is caused by Facebook and Twitter Inc. (NASDAQ:TWTR) notifying users when anything changes on their pages. Using either can easily become an obsession, whether you’re waiting to hear back from friends or hoping a celebrity will re-tweet your latest bit of cleverness.
Former Facebook president Sean Parker has joined the backlash, saying the site was designed to create an addiction dopamine feedback loop.
A public service campaign called Truth About Tech, funded by the Center for Humane Technology, helped by former Facebook and Google workers, has been sounding the alarm since February. They’re being heard. Teens are supposedly abandoning Facebook in droves. For Instagram … which is also owned by Facebook.
Voice Interfaces
Better voice interfaces can get us to look up from our phones.
Apple’s Siri will be a focus at today’s developer conference, and if it can tell you which of those pings and notifications matter, you may wind up ignoring most of them.
This would make Siri a more potent competitor to Alexa, the Amazon interface buried in home speakers and, increasingly, appliances and burglar alarm systems. Apple and Google are trailing Amazon badly in the voice interface area, which leads to a host of artificial intelligence (AI) applications meant to save time, not money.
This was the aim of a controversial demo at Google I/O, where Google Assistant was used to make phone calls and interact with human beings using a technology called Google Duplex.
Critics immediately charged that hackers and spammers could abuse such a feature, but it does show AI’s direction, which is to take mundane tasks out of your hands the way a secretary in my day handled secondary tasks for her boss.
The Bottom Line
People prefer indirect interactions to direct ones. The arrival of smartphones doesn’t change that.
But inside the obsession with what our phones are doing to us is an opportunity to use AI to help us prioritize our time. The voice interface that saves us the most time is going to win the AI race, and that’s at the heart of the Great Game now being played among the Cloud Czars, creating artificial intelligence that is better than the real thing.
Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of the historical mystery romance The Reluctant Detective Travels in Time, available now at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing he owned shares in AMZN and MSFT.
