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Comment by amilios | Hacker News Reader

On the flipside, natural language interfaces have the potential to be extremely easy to use for anyone, including non-experts. Anyone can type a message to the computer, without having to learn the specifics of an interface's custom controls. There are different types of efficiency. I'm assuming you're referring to something like 'operational efficiency', while NLI wins on 'ease of adoption' per se.

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Consider search engines and searching for content more generally: are you certain that natural language is most often used?

When I search for content, I use key terms to produce refined and better results. If you don't use such terms then what you're looking for may be difficult to find.

So, I actually thought the opposite: the growth in userbase that most big tech companies have seen over the 2010s probably meant the "death" of people creating queries á la AltaVista. But it turns out, I think I'm wrong, Google's own research says the average query is between 2-3 words in size, but apparently it has in fact been going up over the years.

Here's my source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1753326.1753333?casa_toke...

I think this is true for everyone. Without ever knowing how google search works, somehow over time you figure out how to do prompt engineering and figure out that the results you want are more highly correlated with certain phrasing.

Wouldn’t something similar apply here though, where after using it for some time you get an inherent understanding of what it works well with and does not?

There’s always some sort of mix of things to learn and make available to the end user though, so that they understand how to use the tool to be successful.

Disclaimer: I also work at Adept

But don't we do this with other humans too? The language one uses with close family, or friends, or colleagues all shifts to achieve the desired effect. Code-switching is pretty common. I think people underestimate how much communication is a feedback-driven process.

Nobody can type a message to a computer without knowing how the interface works. I think you are confused on this topic. Natural language is just a translation layer. If you wanted to you could put AI on top of a UI that works on intent as well.

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