A new surface for building experiences is emerging — an abstraction layer — and this is an intro to what it is, and where I believe it's headed.
I recently wrote about our team’s mission in my final days at Microsoft. I’d spent the prior two years working on “applied intelligence” — services powered by personal assistants and machine learning that understood your preferences and your active context. Our final mandate was to roll out a service connecting every app and service at Microsoft: an intelligence layer, planned and executed in anticipation of the next-gen assistant everyone assumed was around the corner — the Cortana 2.0 or Siri 2.0. It didn’t arrive. At least not for another decade.
I worked on quite a few vision projects in those years — prototypes that simulated the promise of what was to come. One combined sensors, home and vehicle connectivity, and access to your email and calendar to simulate the nuanced awareness of a human personal assistant. A change in the environment, like someone new entering the room, would recalibrate an active conversation and change tack if needed, the way a real person would. I wrote a paper on “intelligent service etiquette” covering the courtesies we’d expect. The service was largely theoretical, but the simulations exposed a real need for machine politeness.
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