The untold story of the most under-used real estate on the phone screen
Which players are best positioned to bundle an AI assistant with their core product?
In Sunday’s post, I proposed that AI assistants are best bundled into products that already command high share of usage and high share of data across a user’s digital activity. Accordingly, the players best positioned to play that game range from products with high frequency core usage to super-apps, BigTech, and B2B workflow hubs.
General purpose assistants need to have horizontal coverage across the spectrum of user needs and horizontal visibility across the data they generate.
There’s another important piece of real estate, well positioned to host an AI assistant. It’s widely visible, yet hidden in plain sight. It’s always on and has a fair degree of visibility across a large spectrum of use cases.
The keyboard on your phone.
Consider this:
Always-on primary interface: The keyboard is an always-on interface, covering roughly 40% of your screen every time you type.
Real-time visibility into all user input: It’s the primary mechanism for user input and, hence, a default contender as a primary interface across all use cases that need user input.
Horizontal visibility across the spectrum of app usage: It captures data across the full spectrum of mobile usage, not just data about what you enter as input but also data about how often you engage with different apps, how much time you spend across different apps etc.
The first two points, in particular, provide a unique right to play. Developing user profiles through a comprehensive view of input data positions the keyboard especially well as a complement to any creative use case involving user input (with some exception of use cases involving voice, photos, and video).
While individual apps have deeper data about consumption, the keyboard is uniquely positioned in its ability to capture data horizontally across ‘creative’ use cases (i.e. use cases requiring user input).