James McQuivey Returns to the Pod
A sneak peek at tomorrow's Kindle Chronicles Podcast
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
What’s hot and what’s not in AI
It was a real treat yesterday to catch up with a long-time friend of my Kindle Chronicles podcast, James McQuivey of Forrester Research.
James and I began having conversations about eBooks and other technology shortly after I launched the podcast in 2008. We’ve covered a lot of ground since then.
The Kindle Chronicles went occasional instead of weekly a few years ago. The last time James was on the show, in February of 2022, was a different era—nine months before the ChatGPT changed everything.
As I’ve been learning and playing with ChatGPT, whom I’ve named P.D., and his cousins (Claude, Grok, Gemini, et al) and related devices (AI Pin, Rabbit R1 and PLAUD NotePin), I’ve often wondered what James was up to in the same space.
It’s his job to keep track of new technology for Forrester’s lucky clients, so his insights carry weight. For me it’s a hobby. But we both get a kick out of trying to see what’s coming around the corner.
I’ve completed editing our conversation and hope to have it uploaded later tonight.
Thanks to the magic of AI tools, I was able to generate a transcript of the interview in a few minutes using Otter.ai. Here are some excerpts:
Generative AI is going to be like electricity, extremely widespread and used for amazing things by almost everyone, and most of the people using it will barely understand how it works, and that won't matter.
As I think about who has the strongest consumer position, it's [Amazon], and it's Google. And basically, for the same reasons, you're using both of those companies every day. Google has certain advantages. Amazon has other advantages. Google more on the digital lifestyle, Amazon more in the physical lifestyle. But you know, they're both very, very well positioned. But the fact that there are microphones all over my house that connect to Amazon gives them a huge advantage.
Vision Pro will go down as probably one of the biggest failures of Apple. I mean, really not since the iPod has Apple had something that's failed to this degree.
AR [augmented reality] glasses are going to be the thing in 2025. They’re all going to be AI smart glasses, instead of visual overlay smart glasses, which is what people have been trying to do and are still trying to do. We are going to have little tiny displays. We're going to have projection directly onto the surface of your eyeball, all of that. But the more important thing that these glasses are going to do is basically put a microphone on your head with a speaker right next to your ear, so that you can have a private AI conversation, and that way not need someone to install six or eight Alexa devices around their house the way Amazon has already done.
When James McQuivey is my guest, the future seems closer and more exciting than ever. I hope you will enjoy the interview!