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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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