AI Inside Every Button: A Plan to Make Apps Understand You

A computer science researcher named Brad A. Myers has published a proposal arguing that the tiny building blocks of every app — menus, scroll bars, text boxes, copy-paste, the things you click without thinking — should become intelligent. Those parts were basically figured out in the 1980s, with only small tweaks added for smartphones in the 2000s. Meanwhile, AI arrived as a chat window bolted onto the side of software, treated as something separate from the buttons and menus underneath.

His vision: the buttons themselves understand what you mean. Say you're in a spreadsheet hunting for the "sort by date" option, and it's buried three menus deep. Instead, you could circle a column with your finger and say "put the newest ones on top." That's the point of mixing modes in one action — voice, typing, touching and pointing together, rather than picking one per task. For you, that means fewer clicks, less hunting through menus, and less time learning how a piece of software wants to be used.

The honest catch is that this is a proposal, not a product. There's no app, no company, no release date — just an argument that researchers should start building it. Myers also notes that making software this responsive means your apps would see and hear far more of what you do: what you point at, what you say, what's on your screen. That raises genuine questions about security, who can access that data, and what it costs to run.

Bigger picture, this is how computing changes. The mouse, the touchscreen, the copy-paste command — each one started as a research idea and ended up reshaping how everyone works. If intelligent buttons catch on, the shift would be from people learning software to software learning people. History suggests that takes years, not months.