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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Generational? Idk. I work for a company that regularly sends out surveys, and there are several tools to integrate voice into it. Willingness to speak instead of type is quite low across respondents (which is a representative population sample). It looks as if speaking to a machine does not hold the same appeal as speaking to a human (something that can also be seen in telephone queue screener questions).

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I hate talking to machines. Sometimes it’s the best option (I love using a voice assistant in the kitchen), but almost always I’d have a full keyboard as an interface instead.

If machines were amazing at Speech-to-Text, okay, sure. But while the capabilities are impressive, they still kinda suck at it.

The only voice control anything I use is to create reminders on my iPhone, and the only reason I use that is because the default reminders app's UX is really bad that it's quicker to use the voice commands.

I don't see how text to code would be faster than typing. And even if it is, typing speed is not really a limiting factor in the speed at which I can produce code.

Speech to text is now amazing: https://huggingface.co/spaces/openai/whisper

It got "Theresa's and Aidsdorm" for "Turisas and Alestorm". Surprisingly, it got pretty close with the German band Schandmaul (something Alexa recognizes 100% of the time as Sean Paul), transcribing to "Schandmauel or Schandmöhrl".

But yeah, that is pretty close to amazing.

I kinda forgot about it after seeing that the Rhasspy community experimented with it, and it had issues with short utterances and a slow startup time.

The first amazing result would not be for you to program with this, but for somebody with a phone to be able to automate a few small tasks with just the voice.

Exactly. We've seen a constant improvement in the tech for decades. I remember before color lcd phones that they had "voice control" and today we have assistants, which are orders of magnitude more sophisticated.

Yet, it hasn't stuck. I'm exclusively using Siri to set timers. Most people are like me, or don't use it at all. Some use assistants for googling factoids or something. Fidelity wise, it's really underwhelming.

It's not a social acceptance issue, because people would still use it at home, and they don't. It's a small chance there's some key UI insight missing (discoverability for one), but I doubt it. Even with perfect UI, natural language is quite flawed when you're dealing with technical details (see exhibit on variable naming).

Anyway, the chances of Github solving this in an exceptionally difficult subdomain, as a side project, seems like a... Let's say, long shot.

That said, the silver lining in all these billions spent on voice interfaces is accessibility. For some people, these things are a life saver.

This is not marketed as an alternative input mechanism for people who have otherwise no difficulty typing code. It's an input mechanism for people whose abilities to type are limited.

Yes, but this answers to the grandparent, not the parent.

This means it's an assistive technology, but hardly "a generational paradigm change in how to write code".

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