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Comment by sparkling | Hacker News Reader

> That “next thing” is probably voice, but no one even seems close.

Am i the only person who has zero interest in voice control? I got a iPhone 4S very early, the first phone that had Siri installed and i can not remember ever using it. Not even trying it out just for fun.

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Not at all - I can't stand voice UI (at the moment). The problem with voice UI as I see it is that until it's perfect, it's horrible. Even if Siri is 80% great, the 20% of the time I have to repeat myself 3, 4, 5 times to get what I want, I've now spent more time than if I'd just using touch UI in the first place. Eventually that gets better, but until then it's too frustrating / slower than just typing.

If you recall, that’s how touch screens used to be. You’d either have to use a stylus or sometimes press multiple times. Even the virtual keyboards on old devices weren’t designed. All the keys were right next to each other, there was no intelligent touch correction/rejection. Pre iPhone was pretty bad.

Voice calls always work and I dumped them in favor of texting as soon as it was an option. I just don't want to use voice outside of special situations.

Aside from that I don't imagine voice will ever be 'dominant' as a UI until we can do so without making sounds.

So much of my day consists of using technology while other people are doing the same thing in my vicinity, and even just that one person in the room with a non-silent device is already annoying, let alone a room full of people talking to themselves.

Subvocalisation or telepathic interfaces should solve that. I think that is actually closer than we think it is.

Try Google Assistant. Most of the studies and tests show it's far more usable than Siri. It still misses things too of course.

You could have said that about touch screens before the iPhone too. Even after it came out people remained skeptical. No one wanted to tap on a sheet of glass when it sucked. One day it didn’t suck anymore and everything was different. 10 years and a billion devices later it worked out.

Voice will have the same revolution at some point. You have zero interest in it now because it sucks. When someone makes it not suck so badly you’ll give it another go.

Can you imagine an occupation where you have to give speeches all day?

This is voice control.

I think people massively overstate the future of voice control. I think it will be used for small things “turn on lights” but not for full computing control interface.

You’re likely not alone, we seldom are, but in my anecdotal point of view most people seem to like it. I personally doubt it’ll be the “next” thing though.

For one it’s already here. It’s not perfect but it works most of the time, and unless someone actually develops true AI, I just see it altering the world any way close to what the smartphone did. It’s a nice way to interface, but it’s not really that great in public.

I like playing with Alexa, which is probably the most feature complete, but lets be real it doesn’t work “most of the time”. It’s garbage. Absolute garbage.

Even basic dictation is maybe 90% accurate at best, which makes it virtually useless.

I have to mostly agree. There are times, very few, when it's useful, and I can see some more areas where it might have some benefit, but honestly? I don't want the world listening to my searches. I think AR has more potential growth, but repeating the iPhones success is probably going to be from left field and not in an obvious area.

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