In the Future, How Will We Talk to Our Technology?

One of the best scenes from Larry David’s tour-de-neuroses Curb Your Enthusiasm opens with Larry sitting at a restaurant. As cheesy music plays, the camera pans out, revealing the guy at the table next to him. He’s sitting alone, but jabbering loudly, reminding someone we can’t see that “on no planet is a shoe caddy a good gift.”

Then comes the reveal: Cut to the other side of this joker’s head, and there’s his Bluetooth headset. Larry, tired of his crap, starts talking loudly to himself. Eventually he fights with the guy next to him, and then they both go back to complaining to the empty chairs in front of them. Jerks.
The episode aired in 2007. Mercifully, the “Bluedouche” problem went away for a while after that—it was replaced by people sitting in silence, staring into their screens, which is at least easier to sit next to. Things are changing again: As we become more reliant on Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and the world of virtual assistants and voice-based apps and platforms, we’re starting to talk to our phones again. But this time, it should be way better.
Right now, we really only had one way to talk to our gadgets: We tap a button, bring the bottom half of our phone to our mouth, and speak extra-clearly into it. But few believe that’s how it’ll always be—and they have plenty of pop culture examples of this future. The earbud from Her, the screens-everywhere world of Total Recall, or the computer in Star Trek. But mostly it’s the earbud from Her.
Everywhere you turn, there’s a company working on this kind of wireless, unobtrusive, forget-it’s-in-there earpiece. Bragi’s Dash is probably the most commonly-cited example, but there’s also the Pearbuds, the OwnPhones, the Motorola Hint, the HearNotes, the Earin buds, the Truebuds, and countless others from companies big and small. Kickstarter’s filthy with the stuff. They’re not just Bluetooth headsets minus the ostentatiousness, they’re an omnipresent way to digitally hear and be heard.

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The Bragi Dash, a set of wireless earbuds you’re meant to wear all the time. Bragi

Larry David wasn’t mad at the jackass next to him because the earpiece offended his refined aesthetic sensibilities, though. He lost his mind because the guy was yelling. At no one. “The number one rule is, it shouldn’t be a disruptive distraction,” says Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert who works with executives on business manners. “It’s enormously convenient to speak into Siri,” she says, but don’t be a jerk about it. And luckily, it’s a little easier now to do that.
For one thing, microphones are getting better. We’ve spent too long screaming into our headsets just to be heard over the wind or traffic, or stringing our microphone into a mustache two inches above our mouths. Now our mics are clearer, stronger, just better. And so is their software.
In the Apple TV demo room after Apple’s recent keynote event, employees were actively discouraging people from holding the remote to their mouth as they spoke search queries to Siri. It works just fine, they said, if you just leave it at your side. This is a triumph of noise-cancellation, using software to throw out all the background noise and better isolate the thing we actually want to hear. As our phones collect Tech like HD Voice makes us sound even better, too, and new low-power processors make sure phones are listening all the time.
Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 processor, which you’ll find in virtually every flagship phone, has built-in technology that can always be listening while using almost no power. Its Sense Audio software can detect where you are by listening to your environment, and selectively remove ugly background noise. Intel’s Edison chipset can be used in similar ways, which Intel found a particularly cool way to demonstrate earlier this year.