Inventions that arrived too early

Engineers and consumer-product developers have always sought to simplify the interface, to make it as fluid as possible. And a genuinely effective interface lets you simplify the hardware in turn, as it becomes redundant and bulky: the keyboard-and-stylus phone gave way to the touchscreen phone.

But several times now, hardware has been stripped back a little too early — just before the interface could support it. You end up with an ergonomic bottleneck, and a device that's appealing in principle but unusable in practice.

iPod Shuffle, 3rd generation

Built to be ultra-compact and minimal, it takes the logic all the way: Apple strips every button from the body in favour of VoiceOver, a voice interface triggered from the button on the earphones.

Google Glass

Privacy concerns and the device's conspicuous looks were only pretexts for watching it fall. Every disruptive new device arrives with its share of flaws; what matters is that it brings more value and relevance than it raises barriers to adoption. Here, the real barrier lay in the use cases, and in a voice interface that was too basic and too robotic.

Xperia Ear Duo

Designed to keep the wearer connected to their surroundings, these wireless earphones adopt an unprecedented open design that layers digital audio over ambient sound, all steered by a gesture-controlled voice assistant.

It's the most telling of the three: you can feel that the architecture was genuinely built around the idea of a voice assistant — and yet that assistant didn't really exist yet.

What voice AI changes

All three products would have benefited enormously from today's advances in LLMs and agentic systems. The same device, wired to a real voice assistant, would have gained the relevance it lacked to become a success.

Voice AI today will allow a dramatic reduction of the physical interface with the digital world, because the functionality and the voice interface are finally good enough.

The architectures were very well conceived. They simply arrived too early. I've reimagined them for today, through two objects: Google Glass Reloaded, a headband architecture rather than glasses, still at the concept stage; and the Smart Bud, an invisible single earbud, now prototyped and worn every day.