RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

The tech that will invade our lives in 2026

- BRIAN X. CHEN

Near the start of each year, I look at what's new in consumer technology to give a heads-up on which innovations could actually affect your day-to-day life amid the many fads you can ignore.

In the past, many trends showed up on this list repeatedly, like the smart home, fitness tech and electric cars, because the tech took time to mature. (Not everything pans out; while those last two examples became hot, smart home technology still has some rough edges.)

Now, it’s undeniable that generative artificial intelligence, the technology driving chatbots, is rapidly changing how many people use their devices and browse the web. The AI boom is also driving tech companies to experiment with selling new gadgets that may succeed the smartphone. And the largely positive consumer sentiment towards self-driving cars has helped Google’s Waymo robot taxis gain traction in major cities, setting up those services to significantly expand this year, including to highways.

Here are the trends to watch this year.

For the past 15 years, Apple, Google and Amazon made a big bet that their Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa voice assistants would persuade people to regularly talk to their computers to get things done. This vision hasn't exactly panned out. People mostly use voice assistants for a few basic tasks, like checking the weather, playing songs and setting kitchen timers. It's especially rare to see people talk to voice assistants in public.

But we may finally see a shift in consumer behaviour with the surging popularity of AI chatbots like OpenAl’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Lots of people are already conversing with the bots through text. So it’s reasonable to predict that as AI voices begin to sound human-like, more people will start to talk to their computers, even in public, said Lucas Hansen, a founder of CivAI, a nonprofit that educates people about Al's capabilities and consequences.