I’ve been thinking about this and I’d go a step further. I feel that current iterations of digital assistants are too passive. They respond when you directly ask them a specific question. This leaves it up to the user to: 1. Know that an assistant could possibly answer the question. 2. Know how to ask the question. 3. Realize that they should ask the question rather than reaching for google or something.

I would like a digital assistant that not only has the question answering ability of a LLM, but also has the sense of awareness and impetuous to suggest helpful things without being asked. This would take a nanny state level of monitoring, but imagine the possibilities. If you had sensors feeding different types of data into the model about your surrounding environment and what specifically you’re doing, and then occasionally have an automated process that silently asks the model something like “given all current inputs, what would you suggest I do?” And then if the result achieves a certain threshold of certainty, the digital assistant speaks up and suggests it to you.

I’m sure tons of people are cringing at the thought of the surveillance needed for this and the trust you’d effectively have to put into BigCorp that owns the setup, but it’s fun to think about nonetheless.