With all the responsibilities piling up on your desk—all the hundreds of emails, tweets, texts and other electronic missives that are inundating you and all the appointments you’ve got to keep—I’ll bet you wish you had your own personal assistant, don’t you? Someone who could sort through all that vital and sometimes completely useless garbage in your life. Someone you wouldn’t even have to guide. Someone who would automatically anticipate your needs and allow you to focus on simply being the brilliant individual you were born to be.
Well … there’s an app for that. Or at least there will be very soon.
What I’m talking about is something that software-developing brainiacs are calling “predictive search.” It’s the latest fancy whiz-bang Web-search tech that uses your mobile device to read your e-mail, scan your calendar, track your location, parse local traffic, pinpoint upcoming flights and guess exactly what you might want to be aware of before you even know you need to know it.
It’s a tech that’s already said to be a part of the new Google Glass (coming to stores soon). The app is called Google Now with that device, but if you don’t want to strap on a pair of these wired-in frames, don’t despair. Similar versions are also expected to be a part of services such as Cue, reQall and MindMeld. In fact, the future thinkers among us believe this technology will become a universal, mainstream part of everything from alarm clocks to bathroom mirrors.
“We can’t go on with eight meetings and 200 e-mails a day,” N. Rao Machiraju, co-founder and chief executive of reQall—which sells its technology to other companies to make their own personal assistant apps—told the New York Times. “We have a technology that isn’t waiting for you to ask it a question, but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that.”
How does it work, actually? I haven’t got a clue. Somehow it follows the digital breadcrumbs you leave behind—your calendar entries, Facebook posts, the restaurants and cinemas you visit regularly—and weaves a predictive tapestry of your life.
Of course, the question of whether this programing will be an über-cool blessing or just one more privacy invading, irritating, pinging notification emanating from your pocket remains to be seen.
Me? I’m staying hopeful. I’m hoping for a completely secure something-or-other that can even someday tweet sweet brief witticisms and reply to urgent e-mails on my behalf. A tech that will handle my daily digital needs, give me a brisk shoulder rub and notify the guy in the next cubicle over that he needs to pipe down and stop making so much noise. Ah, that’ll be the day.
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