Kobo is sending out emails to customers with a message from their CEO, and he says that Kobo is working on some new “projects” that they plan to unveil later this year.
Some people think it’s a sign of new Kobo devices coming soon, and others think it’s going to be some new AI-related features.
The latter is more likely given the wording of the email:
“I’m excited about where we’re headed. We have some amazing projects that should be ready to share with you in the second half of the year—developments that will fundamentally change how we read and write on our devices. We’re going to keep pushing at the edges of what reading can be.”
Reading into that last part, it’s hard not to think it’s AI, especially with Amazon rolling out several new AI features for Kindles in recent months. The logical move for Kobo would be to add something like Amazon’s Story So Far feature that gives summaries of books up to the point you’ve read without spoilers—it’s actually pretty useful when it’s available, but not a lot of books support it yet.
Amazon also recently added AI-powered search and summaries for notebooks on Kindle Scribes, and Kobo’s notebook app hasn’t seen any meaningful updates in a long while, so they could be working on some AI notebook features too.
Either way, a new Kobo device is unlikely to “fundamentally change how we read and write on our devices”. It’s gotta be AI. That’s where everything is headed. And it makes you wonder if that email was written by AI. There are three consecutive paragraphs with em dashes—not a good sign. 😀
This is similar to how Kobo’s CEO posted on social media last year about a new little hardware surprise coming soon, and it ended up being the Kobo Remote page turner. Whatever it is, this is an easy way to get some attention and build hype for future developments.
What projects do you hope Kobo is working on for the second half of this year?
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