Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

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The author makes it seem that everybody is eager to use voice assistants to replace their Android or iOS screen interactions. But I don’t know anybody who would dictate their private messages on the subway, or even at home - they are called private for a reason. And just imagine requesting „tell me the current value of a bitcoin“ while at work - I don’t think this would go well.

There would be a lot of noise pollution everywhere, with people constantly murmuring to themselves, alternated with an unresponsive silence while listening to the device‘s answer. It would seem like everybody is on the phone, all the time. Also, for me, digesting information via text is way easier, because I can jump back and forth to support short term memory - good luck with that with a voice assistant.

The iPhone (and friends) disrupted the PC because they made reading and writing mobile. Voice assistants are not iterating on this paradigm, but they are rather iterating on phone calls. I‘m skeptical that this is suitable to replace the iPhone I‘m writing this on.

I don't think you've seen enough people using WhatsApp to send voice messages to their contacts. I do see a lot of people doing that on the subway, the bus, the street, and everywhere else around Barcelona. And it is the same in every other place I've been to recently.

And I can see a very obvious reason why: it's easier. Typing is annoying and slow, and you make lots of mistakes. People don't care others are listening. When was the last time you memorized something irrelevant someone else next to you was saying on the phone?

Maybe you don't want a single word of what you talk about to be heard by anyone else. But most other people don't care, and the reality is that most other people around are too bothered with their own lives to pay any attention to it.

Whenever I get a vocal message I just ignore it and write back ”sorry, I’m not going to open that because I am in a delicate situation, could you please resend as text?” People being lazy doesn’t mean they can expect me to disrupt my existence to receive their lazy communication,if it isn’t worth their time to type it then it isn’t worth my time to read it.

I don't use the voice features of whatsapp, but my wife often does. Nuances of voice communication, such as "how worried does X sound" are important to both her and the group she is in.

I dislike it too, but there's a huge number of people that don't. I noticed a lot of South Americans and Spanish people using WhatsApp via voice recordings. Coming from Asia, I gotta say we prefer communicating with emojis. :p

I bet you have lots of friends.

Could you please not post uncivil or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? It's against the spirit and rules of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I find my comment civil, substantive, and a worthwhile contribution to the discussion. Maybe you should talk to the guy I replied to.

This is the future that Her presents[1]. There's a scene on the subway where everyone's chatting away to their AI, and you can see how it could be normalised.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

Sure, but we're nowhere near that at the moment.

I'm sure this is what a lot of people at Apple told themselves, and the downside risk of that thinking has already arrived. Now voice assistants power connected speakers, a market Apple is trying to enter, and they're years behind on the fundamental UI technology that powers it. Whoops.

Switching to voice is a fundamental change. Amazon made a dent in the universe:

http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-univers...

You make a very good point on this.

As you say, a big win by text is that you can quickly skim it, ignore parts of it that you don't deem to be relevant, and essentially only use the working/short-term memory for the information you are interested the most in the context. Therefore, if the device responds back to you in voice, even if it's entirely a human-like experience, that's still inferior (at least in terms of speed) compared to the text-based experience.

Even for using voice as an input-only mechanism, it's still going to contain lots of redundant/useless information and verbosity.

Compare "OK google, what is the price of bitcoin today?" vs goolging "bitcoin price".

Before the Internet, you had to talk to people to do all the things we now do with apps and web browsers and texts and so on. A lot of time was spent on the phone. So the world has gotten quieter, but it's not like it was that quiet to begin with.

We had those phones on the wall though, confined to a dedicated location, and not in our ears.

I think people are going to switch to voice-only interface not because they are eager to use it. People are starting to realize the mobile phone is a time black-hole, and will restrict themselves from using them. But they still need to stay connected, that's where voice interface comes in.

I could easily see a chat thread with Alexa where I can ask things I don't want to say out loud.

Like:

- "Number for city of [myCity] utilities"

- "[what's the current] bitcoin price"

- "what's my checking account balance"

- "remind me on the first to change the air filter every [X] months"

Etc. Essentially this would be used while I don't want to bother people around me. I'll be eager to use a voice assistant when it becomes convenient for me. Siri isn't there yet, but my Alexa interactions are damn-near close already (No experience with Google or others). If this saves me from opening up a google tab, or some little-used app then I'm all for it.

What Alexa considers Utterances can simply be interpreted as text instead of speech[-to-text]. The testing tools for Alexa Skills already allows this. Hell, I developed a skill with a strong user base without an Echo device at all.

I use Alexa/Amazon in this case because I've used it first-hand. Any other AI would work just as well (as talking directly to it).

Interestingly, for the items you listed, I am skeptical that needing to jump through the hoops of NLP would result in a more convenient experience for some users.

It feels like the reason why some of these voice systems actually have utility is because they are usable in scenarios where you typically can't/don't want to type (such as while driving, lying on the couch at your house, etc). When you require somebody to type in their query, I'm struggling to see why an Alexa/AI chat thread would perform better than just a search engine with AI features. Or how, practically, it's different than just a "thread" where what you type goes to a search engine.

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