The Input Method as the Entry Point for AI Services

Originally published in Chinese on November 22, 2024. By late 2024, phone makers were adding AI to their voice assistants, and a recent wave of promotion pitched the input method as another AI entry point. I think that idea is probably right but aimed too low, and what the input method can be is larger than an AI box. Voice: phone makers going deeper into services Talk of an entry point for AI comes down to a few scenarios and ways of interacting, and different products reach different conclusions about it. Take the voice assistants on phones. They have long delivered only simple services, and now models and a choice of application scenarios have been added. Phone makers have started to embed deeper services, and I expect large-scale products in the first half of 2025. Each maker chooses a different path, but all of them land on the user's scenarios and how people use the phone, and there is no essential difference there. Text: standalone apps and the input method Beyond voice, what people overlooked is text interaction. Since the day ChatGPT launched, the dialog box has defined text interaction. For a long time, though, text interaction lived in a brand-new app. That is allowed, and the competition created a new category. But the least painful and least intrusive place for text interaction is the place where text is typed. Through 2023 and 2024 we saw various products for input and interaction appear, from large companies and small ones. The big companies' input methods have quietly been stacking on AI features, from Baidu and iFlytek to WeChat and Sogou, and none of them is good enough yet. The input method as carrier and system entry point