Because Audio

what’s next?

As we develop our next product, I find myself contemplating what a speaker wants to be, the role of sound in our shared existence, and the assimilation of AI into our daily lives. Most of all, I aspire to build something that brings people much closer together.

certainty and homogeneity

The push and pull in pursuit of breakthrough personal AI hardware is intensifying, and rampant cross pollination across our industry has simultaneously driven certainty and homogeneity of product plans. The battle is for the individual, and form factors have settled on our most historic and time-honored personal accessories: watches, glasses, headphones, rings, pendants. All of these personal devices will be useful to some of us, some of the time. None will be solely depended upon, nor will they reverse the isolating effects of having already become so intimately attached to our technology.

dance like no-one is looking

New public ways of wearing potentially invasive technologies such as cameras and microphones, are triggering social, legal, and philosophical obstacles to their adoption. How we develop trust and how the technology further alters our public behavior, that remains to be seen. Our guard is up, social media addiction is real, and a new generation is suffering from always being observed. They don’t know what it means to dance like no-one is looking.

omnipresent devices

Two intelligent product categories remain. We live with them for extended periods of time, globally, every single day: the phone and the speaker. One, highly personal, the other inextricably social.

it was the interface

We can thank the phone for our personal independence. It is the persistent, intelligent communicator and multi-tool that we trust at scale, and take for granted. Now we can assume it to be the immediate go-to for mass adoption of personal intelligence, and we expect it to adapt as it continues to manage our self.

After 20 years it may now need restating, the magic of iPhone was multi-touch, this groundbreaking new human interface accelerated the Information Age with new creative freedom, and by putting access in every hand.

i believe

Intelligent speakers on the other hand have not yet had their moment, they are in their ‘Blackberry’ stage, simply ‘smart’. While we are being ushered towards ‘personal super intelligence’, somehow along the way we forget that life’s best moments are shared together. We are naturally social and home must remain our safe haven, a place to be uninhibited and freely engaged with friends and family. Speakers, driven by a litany of inventions have animated our entire lives, bringing movies to life and moving us with music, cementing lifelong memories.

Sound is vital in stirring the soul, because hearing is a super high bandwidth spatial sense, and it is remarkably underutilized. I believe that sound is the key to unlocking social intelligence with a radically human interface.

our constant spatial sense

Our senses do not contribute equally to how we experience the world together. Vision is directional; we glance, focus, and look away. Touch is exclusive; we manipulate one object at a time. Sound, however, is ambient. It continuously informs us about our surroundings without demanding our attention, maintaining a shared, constant awareness of people, place, activity and communication. This is what makes audio unique: it augments our shared awareness rather than competing for it, making it the most natural medium through which AI can participate in our life without becoming the center of it.

reality is the medium

Computer UI has constantly and instinctively; leveraged our relationship with the real world to ground our understanding of how to relate to machines. First as metaphors with windows, desktops and trash cans on the PC, then imitating reality in iOS and manipulating ‘objects’ physically with touch. The inevitable human interface simply is natural human behavior, the virtual must meet us on our terms and join us in reality.

We are developing socially intelligent audio. It is necessarily a spatial sound field, it is for sharing, and is to remain private. Communication takes many forms and conversational voice is simply a first step in this direction, now those voices must move amongst us. The magic is in knowing who is speaking and from where, for the most personable and tailored exchanges. As for the outcomes, we put you on the stage, in the game, and present with friends. There is no longer an audience when you are involved.

the map

This is a scalable coordinate system for sound, that locks with the coordinate systems of wearables and devices with which we augment sight, not to display, but to see. A safe place where glasses, goggles, and phones match sight with sound out-loud in free space, merging the virtual with the real. Bigger than any one device, we manage how multiple people, with various devices cooperate. This is visceral, delightful engagement where nobody is left out.

new horizons

There was no hint of the content creation and community apps to come when we (Apple) launched iPhone; we converged personal devices into one, and added a radical human interface, raising the creative ceiling for developers who quickly outpaced legacy computing.

Now, Syng is converging social device clutter into a simple and delightful new icon for home, your hub for social intelligence. As they grow in numbers while friends and family gather, the sound field increases in scale and resolution. Space itself is the new multi-sense canvas, with new degrees of creative liberty, for as yet unimagined experiences to be lived freely together with the people we love.

The new vehicle for AI is as amorphous as the technology, it’s space itself. Mass AI proficiency will be achieved when it is second nature, and sound is the gateway to this very human UI.

Thank you for reading,

Christopher Stringer
Syng