Personal agents

OpenAI bought io. It is time to start dreaming about AI companions. But what exactly will they do?

Personal assistants

The most obvious use case is a personal assistant. An agent that helps you with your day-to-day life: managing emails, calendar, tasks, grocery lists, and more. This is the natural evolution of existing assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Operate everything

While home assistants offered a glimpse into home automation, AI companions will operate everything.

Let us take your oven as an example. The interaction would feel more like talking to a sous-chef:

• You snap a photo of a turkey and ask for cooking instructions.
• You point your camera at the oven and ask it to preheat.
• The agent dials in the temperature and notifies you when it is ready.
• You slide in the turkey. The agent sets the timer and monitors the sensors.
• When the bird is done, it lets you know and turns off the heat.
• Hours later, from the road, you ask if the oven is off. It is. You relax.

Digital twins for appliances already exist; only the MCP layer is missing. So I built it. It comes with a tiny simulator, no hardware purchase required.

Beyond the oven

This same pattern extends to your car, TV, washing machine, anything connected. Over time, the agent learns your preferences and habits. It knows you prefer your turkey medium-rare and your coffee black at 07:00 sharp.

All hail the AI companion

Could a smartphone handle all of this?
Absolutely, once reliable MCP servers are in place.

However, io's expertise in hardware design suggests a different approach. The real innovation lies in how we will interact with them.
More immersive. More natural. More human?