Proponents of artificial intelligence are quick to list the myriad ways their tech will serve as extensions of our busy brains. But as Apple, Google, and other companies race to bring their AI creations onto our phones, we’re being presented with an opportunity to use these next-gen digital assistants to correct one of our inherent human flaws: poor memory.
Tom Gruber, who cofounded the company that created Apple’s Siri voice assistant, says the potential for offloading memory-dependent tasks is the first big leap toward making AI assistants that can truly ape human thinking.
“The basic pieces of cognition, the fundamental one is memory,” Gruber says. “It’s the functional inner loop, the basis of almost all of our inference. Almost all of our daily cognition or computation is memory-based. We can do so much augmentation with just memory. It’s just one of the things that humans aren’t so hot at.”
Human brains, Gruber says, are really good at story retrieval, but not great at remembering details, like specific dates, names, or faces. He has been arguing for digital AI assistants that can analyze everything you do on your devices and index all those details for later reference. He’s advised startups and given TED Talks about the viability of using AI to do your memory’s dirty work.
“You can enhance anything that is digitally mediated today,” Gruber says. “That’s why I was saying to the world, please build this.”
There are many ways this memory enhancement could manifest. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of the tech analyst firm Moor Insights and Strategies, predicts that phones may soon employ something akin to constant screenshots powered by AI, snapping images of your phone’s screen every few seconds and storing those images for later use. Then when you find you can’t recall a certain detail—maybe you’re trying to remember the particulars of a conversation you had, or the name of somebody you met three months ago—you could ask an AI assistant. The assistant would be able to call up everything it deems relevant, from across your messaging apps, emails, and LinkedIn DMs to provide an answer.
“I think this will be in every end device operating system by the end of this year,” Moorhead says. “It will give you cross application ability, across Microsoft, across Google, across Apple environments. Taking tiny little snapshots of everything you do on your phone. And then what it’s doing is cross-correlating everything to give you better results.”
Some services are nudging toward this already. Google is developing a system called ScreenAI that reads phone screenshots and parses the text and information within to answer questions or surface information ambiently. The company has also recently shown off tech like its Gemini AI-infused Search and AI-powered Notebook that can summarize documents and combine various bits of information to come up with insights you might not have thought of otherwise. (Apple is in the AI game now too, working on its own AI models, while also partnering with Google to stand on the shoulders of its Gemini offerings.) Other companies are creating all manner of digital assistants to do your boring office chores and even play video games. Devices like the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI pin aim to take mind-numbing tasks off your phone and let an AI assistant handle them. Rewind.AI wants to collect data from every moment of your waking life, then serve it up for recall when you forget someone’s birthday. It’s a flood of tools, all at your disposal soon.
But the next step will be trying to smoothly integrate all those tasks into your phone—or whichever piece of AI-infused hardware you want to carry around—in a way that feels cohesive. The stratospheric hype around artificial intelligence has sent app developers scrambling to add AI to absolutely everything, and that rushed rollout has resulted in some haphazard and disconnected integrations that can feel downright janky when you try to switch between multiple services.
Making these tools work together will be key to this concept taking off, says Leo Gebbie, an analyst who covers connected devices at CCS Insight. “Rather than having that sort of disjointed experience where certain apps are using AI in certain ways, you want AI to be that overarching tool that when you want to pull up anything from any app, any experience, any content, you have the immediate ability to search across all of those things.”
When the pieces slot together, the idea sounds like a dream. Imagine being able to ask your digital assistant, “Hey who was that bloke I talked to last week who had the really good ramen recipe?” and then have it spit up a name, a recap of the conversation, and a place to find all the ingredients.
“For people like me who don’t remember anything and have to write everything down, this is going to be great,” Moorhead says.
And there’s also the delicate matter of keeping all that personal information private.
“If you think about it for a half second, the most important hard problem isn’t recording or transcribing, it’s solving the privacy problem,” Gruber says. “If we start getting memory apps or recall apps or whatever, then we’re going to need this idea of consent more broadly understood.”
Despite his own enthusiasm for the idea of personal assistants, Gruber says there’s a risk of people being a little too willing to let their AI assistant help with (and monitor) everything. He advocates for encrypted, private services that aren’t linked to a cloud service—or if they are, one that is only accessible with an encryption key that’s held on a user’s device. The risk, Gruber says, is a sort of Facebook-ification of AI assistants, where users are lured in by the ease of use, but remain largely unaware of the privacy consequences until later.
“Consumers should be told to bristle,” Gruber says. “They should be told to be very, very suspicious of things that look like this already, and feel the creep factor.”
Your phone is already siphoning all the data it can get from you, from your location to your grocery shopping habits to which Instagram accounts you double-tap the most. Not to mention that historically, people have tended to prioritize convenience over security when embracing new technologies.
“The hurdles and barriers here are probably a lot lower than people think they are,” Gebbie says. “We’ve seen the speed at which people will adopt and embrace technology that will make their lives easier.”
That’s because there’s a real potential upside here too. Getting to actually interact with and benefit from all that collected info could even take some of the sting out of years of snooping by app and device makers.
“If your phone is already taking this data, and currently it’s all just being harvested and used to ultimately serve you ads, is it beneficial that you’d actually get an element of usefulness back from this?” Gebbie says. “You’re also going to get the ability to tap into that data and get those useful metrics. Maybe that’s going to be a genuinely useful thing.”
That’s sort of like being handed an umbrella after someone just stole all your clothes, but if companies can stick the landing and make these AI assistants work, then the conversation around data collection may bend more toward how to do it responsibly and in a way that provides real utility.
It’s not a perfectly rosy future, because we still have to trust the companies that ultimately decide what parts of our digitally collated lives seem relevant. Memory may be a fundamental part of cognition, but the next step beyond that is intentionality. It’s one thing for AI to remember everything we do, but another for it to decide which information is important to us later.
“We can get so much power, so much benefit from a personal AI,” Gruber says. But, he cautions, “the upside is so huge that it should be morally compelling that we get the right one, that we get one that’s privacy protected and secure and done right. Please, this is our shot at it. If it’s just done the free, not private way, we’re going to lose the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do this the right way.”
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Boone Ashworth
