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Comment by autoliteInline | Hacker News Reader

I can think of a brilliant use case, but it's the only one I can think of offhand.

For the disabled, particularly blind people, it would be great to have interactive voice stuff if that whole ecosystem were really fleshed out. Some of this exists but a world of audio books, online banking, interaction with social media, all with interfaces optimized for voice use/audio listening would be great.

Interacting with a screen by having some software read it to you just seems incredibly clumsy.

Personally, I think the hands-off case for automotive use is dangerous. Talking on the phone or listening to email while driving is sketchy even though you're still gripping the steering wheel. AM/FM radio interfaces were perfected 75 years ago.

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> AM/FM radio interfaces were perfected 75 years ago.

While I agree physical and simple is best, I've also totaled a car by fussing with such a radio and driving. Safest is probably no radio and no distractions. Second best may be set and forget interfaces that don't allow changes while moving.

I know of some people who use them as an excuse to get their kids to learn some English... I'm not really sold on it, but it makes some sense.

If you want to work on this: https://mycroft.ai/

Thanks, I'll check it out.

In order to really reach people with vision issues, it seems like places like Bank of America (just an example) need to do a good job of Alexa skills. Dunno how you deal with security.

As a side note, it's funny how absurd online banking websites are. It's a thing that would be well served by simple/secure pure text interfaces but that certainly isn't what you get.

The amount of cruft on the web just blows me away, whether it's a weather or real estate or recipe site. We're living in a world of shit.

Treat the crappy site as an API and make a better interface. Like the SimpleWeb project: https://simple-web.metalune.xyz/

Having worked for and with a few different large companies, my experience has been that multi-national banks are the most pathologically "not a single entity". They have all sorts of factions within often working directly against the interests of each other, with large projects kept secret purely for _internal_ competitive advantage. With that model, the resulting mangled mess they present as an interface makes significantly more sense.

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