The Probabilistic Product

Chapter 3. The Intent Interface: Voice, Natural Language, and the Agent Architecture

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During a casual dinner table argument last year, my dad turned to me and said, “Why don’t you ask Sammy what he thinks?” My dad is in his mid-70s. Until that summer, he didn’t understand or care what ChatGPT was. But a few weeks earlier, I had introduced him to voice mode and joked that the voice was named Sam — after Sam Altman. The joke stuck. I noticed he wasn’t asking what the computer thought, but what Sammy thought, the way you’d ask an uncle or a neighbor. The interface had dissolved into a person. So we asked it. My dad put the question to Sammy out loud, and instead of reading back a paragraph, it walked through the tradeoffs and then asked whether it should dig up the actual numbers before we settled it. Then it put together a summary table for comparison on the screen. Nobody at the table had touched a keyboard. That was the moment I knew the chat box wasn’t going to win. Voice was.

What happened at the dinner table that night was a household-scale instance of ...