The first piece of 2024 & it’s honey-licious! Let’s get right into it, today we have —

• 🍯 A look into aiOS

• 🔮 MAJOR updates to AIverse

• 😎 Speak the language

• 🤣 Memes of the day

pssst… we’re on Twitter/X now :)

AI’s like my 4-year-old nephew. Every week, he wants to be something new when he grows up…

One day it’s a soccer pro. The next day it’s an astronaut. Now, he just wants to be a garbage man.

AI’s similar. It has a ton of different narratives right now.

Human clone. Stalker. World domination. You name it.

Here’s exactly where we are today:

• Conversational UX / Chat-styled interactions is what everyone’s making.

• Some tasks which are possible through conversational UX —

  • Fire-and-forget-tasks like “play music”.

  • Specific trivia queries like “weather”, adding To-Dos.

  • A conversational partner like an AI girlfriend.

But there are many problems with conversational UX —

• People land on an empty screen. They then try to decipher what all can be done.

• People use apps which keep track of their state.

  • Editing - Whether it be video, audio or article, you need store the draft version to come back to later on.

  • Travel planning - tracking what places you’ve seen and which bookings you’ve already made.

  • Researching - opening 50 tabs to keep track of the different directions you’re exploring.

So the next question is obvious — what’s after ChatGPT? Are we meant to be prompt-designers/prompt-engineers/prompters??

Here’s where we are headed, in 2030 :

There are 4 AI innovation trends that are taking place under our noses —

• Dynamic Interfaces,

• Ephemeral Interfaces,

• aiOS ← today’s post,

• Screen-less UX

The other three trends for another time 😉 

A look into aiOS — What is it?

There are many definitions of the term ‘aiOS’, but the most basic one is - an Operating System powered by AI. Seems obvious right?

Jordan Singer, doing somethin’ somethin’ with AI @Figma, described it as a UX controlled only by conversations.

But conversations is just one medium.

There can be other ways of interacting within the aiOS.

The pull-to-refresh type intuitive interaction is still TBD.

Irrespective of the interaction, the underlying values for the aiOS are going remain the same. Let’s dive into the 4 major aiOS values —

1. You don’t go out, it comes to you

It’s about bringing everything to you, as a user.

• At app level - it can be through chatbots,

• At inter-app level - it can be through Adept, ideally just explaining in a chat what you want to be done, the AI does it for you.

• At browser level - it can be through Arc Search, you just search and the browser browses for you.

• and now zoom out further, how would it look at OS level?

• and now zoom out further, how would it look at the hardware level? (next Voyager issue 😉)

2. Interoperable apps

Apps which can communicate between each other

Let’s say you’re a freelance copywriter starting your Monday morning.

It’s lunch time.

Phew, a lot of switching between apps. Now, what if you could browse ALL your things in ONE fluid interface?

The answer? Itemized workspaces.

All apps are items or features.

You can drag drop your podcast episode into your notes app. Not as a reference, but the episode itself. You can drag-drop your half written email into your notes to come back to again. You can drag drop the flight you want into your calendar and it’s booked.

Any app/item can be pulled into any other app/item.

It’s all intuitive, much faster and clearer.

2.5. Built-in OS level solutions

Bringing apps to OS level has been happening since the beginning of time. When the app store was launched, basic features were stand-alone apps.

For example, the flashlight apps.

Similarly, Grammarly or ChatGPT that helps us write better (with auto correct or text prediction) need not be at app level right? It could easily be at OS level, built into the keyboard.

3. Context is foundational

The problem with current AI applications (read: conversational AI-UX) is that they aren’t in the same context as the user.

A simple application of this in the traditional setting (apps and websites) would be — what if websites had the context of how many times you’re visited?

You can adapt the UI based on the visits.

Now imagine scaling this at an OS level.

A good example of this is what if your input method is determined by how you’re positioned with the device?

Adding context of the user from outside the bounds of the app/website makes the user experience much more intuitive and faster.

4. Everything is an input

You might have guessed this one. It overlaps with the above value.

And because AI can understand language, essentially conversations, it also understands all the mediums of communication i.e., voice, visual and text.

So now everything is an input and everything is an output.

You can input in text and get an output as a visual — without you have to choose if that’s the best medium, ai does that for you.

And that’s it, those are the 4 values being considered to create the aiOS. So what do you think..

…is AI powered OS the next big thing?

On a completely random note, if aiOS was a movie —

*static noise*

We know we’re not interrupting, but HQ told us you needed to know this…

There have been MAJOR updates on the AIxDesign platform!

🔮 The library just got diverse!! New interactions have been added, your research time has been reduced;

We now have 80+ (top quality) AI-UX interactions!

🔮 We thought, why just share corporate’s AI adventures? There are so many people doing amazing work and being creative.

We're now on Twitter/X 🎊 

We share your favourite corporate’s AI updates AND as a bonus, community’s favourite AI explorations. 113 posts live, we’re growing!

We browse so that you don’t have to :)

*static noise*

Today’s Voyager is brought to you by [👀]

No sponsors yet. But we’re eyeing you 👀 

You can get in early and become our first sponsor. You get a space (1) in this newsletter,(2) in the AI-UX gallery and (3) in our hearts.

😎 Speak the language

Things are changing, again. AI is bringing in a new era, and yes, it’s got its own set of tricky words. We, as designers, are not just about choosing the right colours anymore; it’s time to get smart with tech words! We can’t just be the 'can we have it green and on the right?' squad.

We don’t want the only tech folks to decide the future, do we?

We’re collecting some AI topics that you’d like an easy/visual explanation about - something that confuses you and want it to be simplified. Send in your suggestions so we can start speaking the techies’ language.

Some things we have on the list are - embeddings, rollout, token. Have you heard of them? Got any more?

🤣 Memes of the day