I can’t help but wonder if the reason “agentic” systems seem so appealing to people is because as an industry we’ve spent the past fifteen years making software harder to use.
I have the latest Google Pixel, and was using Google Maps to navigate.
I pressed the "voice search" button from within Google Maps and said "What is the name of the mountain on the left that I'm about to drive past?"
Instead of a context-aware answer, my phone simply did a Google search for that exact phrase and showed the results to me. The top hit was a Reddit thread about some mountain near Seattle. :)
I guess we're entering an age where people might have a reasonable expectation that any app is a context-aware LLM, but personally I don't have that assumption yet.
It also depends on the context of the action. If you’re sitting in front of your computer, yeah, no big deal. Type “podcast” in the search field of the messages app and click the thing it finds. But if you’re busy cooking dinner or cleaning out the cat box, it’s a pain to get your phone out and poke around. The main draw of voice assistants (at least to me) is that they let you do things quickly when you don’t already have a device in your hands.