Intentface: Human-Centric Computing Through Intent-Driven Interactions

Joni Juup

September 1, 2023

An intentface represents the next step in user interfaces, utilizing natural language comprehension and contextual information to convert human desires and objectives into actionable tasks that computers can understand and execute.

Introduction

When you think about it, clicking dropdowns, filling input fields and browsing abstract representations of data feels kind of odd. It's not what we should spend our time learning and doing. These are all abstractions we've built out of necessity because computers haven't been able to translate our language and needs into actions. But that has now changed.

Intentface as a word embodies our vision where technology understands us, not the other way around.

By leveraging advancements in natural language understanding, adaptive learning systems, and data contextuality, intentfaces can directly translate our spoken and unspoken needs into meaningful actions.

The essence of an intentface is to make technology more intuitive and user-centric by allowing users to express their needs most naturally—through language, context and actions.

We envision a future where technology is seamlessly integrated into our lives, becoming an invisible, user-friendly extension of ourselves. A future where we can focus on doing things that make us happier as humans instead of being glued to our screens.

Examples of intentfaces

An intentface is a service that can be operated with natural language or contextual data, including your actions or voice. Early examples we've already implemented in our daily lives are services like ChatGPT, knowledge-base assistants, development co-pilots, image-, voice- and video-generation services where you can create content via prompts and voice-driven AI assistants like Siri and Alexa.

A common denominator for these is the ability to understand intent to a certain level and generate content or actions based on non-exact natural language. Instead of naming actions to do it, we can state the outcome we want.

Change Will Not Happen Overnight

Traditional user interfaces will still overlap with intentfaces as a granular way to control software and apps. A fully screenless future is a compelling idea, but screens have their place, especially for tasks requiring focused attention, like viewing and browsing content and precision work.

AI assistants, co-pilots and chatbots are a great new way of interacting and navigating software and knowledge, but a chat-based user interface is not always the optimal solution. But when you start thinking software through intent-driven interactions, you can see many other ways of translating intent into actions.

While we can only partially eliminate traditional UIs, intentfaces can reduce the time we need to spend with them. An intentface-powered service can make it easier to start using any new service, understand new concepts and filter information for us more efficiently, among many other advantages.

A significant change in human-computer interaction is happening

Phones with multitouch screens and faster mobile connections changed how we interact with technology by bringing a user interface to small devices, making it very convenient to use software on the go. This change also brought years of converting old software and building new mobile-native services. The paradigm shift didn't happen just because companies wanted to build mobile-driven services to use new technologies, but because the users started getting used to the convenience and demanded it.

We believe generative AI is enabling a similar significant paradigm shift with human-computer interaction, where companies need to start thinking about how they can build their generative AI native services and products to stay relevant. Again, it's not about the technology but the user experience and convenience it brings.

The revolution isn't only about making smarter technology but crafting technology that understands us better. And that's the future Intentface is building—one interaction at a time.