Ambient Intelligence
The best tech does the job quietly and then gets out of the way.

I created a hotspot on my phone recently.
I forgot to turn it off after I was done. So getting a notification saying that my hotspot was automatically turned off was comforting.
I wouldn’t even have thought about this momentary experience if I didn’t think to make a post out of it.
The best tech quietly gets the job done and then gets out of the way.
AI is mostly hype. But the best use cases of AI I’ve seen are ones that quietly enhance the product.
Maze’s user testing flow is a good example. Maze only does unmoderated studies. But you can insert AI to ask follow-up questions based on a participant’s open-ended answer. The first time I used this feature it felt like magic. It’s a decent bridge towards moderated testing and it freed our team up to spend more time designing and less time on administrative research tasks.
I want to see more passive artificial intelligence. Tech that works in the background to make my life easier. I prefer ambient intelligence.
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P.S. I get way too many notifications even after aggressively clamping down on them. But this is nothing, my parents’ phones are waterfalls of notifications. Endless.
I tweaked this on Fri Jan 24 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)