So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech recognition itself has gotten really good but then understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is natural language understanding, and that is often the problem.
Citation needed, there's a lot of disagreements and misunderstandings (some have cost lives) that could've been avoided if we didn't have 10 different ways to say the same vague thing that can be interpreted in 20 ways. You think the military uses a phonetic alphabet and specifically structured communications for fun? Or the way planes talk to ATC for example. Where precision and unambiguity is crucial, natural language always gets ditched for something more formal.
I only use voice assistants to set alarms. I cannot imagine voice as a primary input. Then again, many have opted out of owning desktops and laptops in favor of mobile phones. That also seems terribly inefficient.
A lot of people don't need computers in the general purpose sense. I admit my mind boggles a bit when co-workers tell me their kids don't want a computer to do their school papers because their phone is fine. But, then, I'm used to keyboards and what we think of as a "computer" and have been using one for decades--and grab one when I can for any remotely complex or input-heavy task.
I grew up in the 1980s, when handwritten papers were still the norm. I do see the advantages of using a word-processor for writing papers, but don't see why it would be a necessity (at least, until University).
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21227741/apple-ipad-pro-m...
Suggests a keyboard and large tablet is heavier than a laptop
I actually do wish there were good Mac or Chromebook choices for a travel 11" or so laptop but the market seems to have settled on a thin 13" as the floor and, admittedly, the weight/size difference isn't huge.
In response to a grandparent comment about weight for tablets: I prefer Apple’s folio old style of cases/keyboards because of weight. I have one for both my small and large iPad Pros. Whenever I travel, I usually just take one of my iPads if I don’t need a dev environment [1].
[1] but with GitHub Codespaces and Google Colab, development on an iPad is sort of OK.
Might as well go for the laptop at that point given that it can actually do far more imo, unless you ditch the phone and go for one of those half phone half tablets I guess.
For reading, I'm probably bringing my Kindle along if I don't bring my tablet.
Back to work? Sit on table, one cable and it's back to a desktop and charging up again.
Makes the whole thing make far more sense.
The killer-tech will be when we have a tablet that is as light as phone.
Around when Android appeared, and the first voice searches began, Google suddenly started to alias everything.
Search for 'Andy', 'Andrew' appears. Search for 'there', and 'they're' appears.
This has been taken further, now silly aliases such as debian .. ubuntu exist, and as google happily drops words in your search, to find a match, this makes precision impossible.
But, that's the only way to make voice search remotely work, so...
If you have terms you don't want interpreted broadly you can put them in quotes.
I preached the Gospel of Google when the competition was composed of web rings and Altavista, but Google in its infinite wisdom has abandoned the advanced user with changes of this nature.
https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...
Maybe we don't have clear intentions in the first place, maybe languages are not just ambiguous, but only meant to narrow realms of valid interpretations down to a desired precision, rather than intended to form a logically fully constrained statements. Maybe this is why intelligent entities are needed to "correctly" interpret natural language statements, because an act of interpretation itself is a decision making and an action.
Just my thoughts but I do think there are more to be said than "natural languages are ambiguous".
Using language to instruct humans goes wrong all the time. Just a short while ago on British Bakeoff I saw 2 of the contestants make white chocolate feathering on their biscuits by making actual feathers out of white chocolate and placing them on their biscuits. And I'm sure that will confuse quite a few people reading this too. It certainly confuses image searches. Language is a fuzzy interface. Compare to interface like clicking on a button that does the thing I want done.
And that's why all of aviation has moved to a tight phraseology, such that delegated commands are universally understood and their meaning is set in stone.
Natural language has cost many lives.
Not always resulting in unambiguous instructions:
"Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns." ~Lord Raglan, Balaclava
"I wish him to take Cemetery Hill if practicable." ~Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg
On the other hand, legalese exists and is the lingua franca of telling people what to do, and math exists.
I think this is really a characterization. Mostly human communication is full of errors and problems.
What is true is that when it is important enough, humans have come up with ways that minimize communication errors and frameworks to deal with ambiguity - mostly these involve training and effort though, it really doesn't come naturally.
Every time we try to minimize errors, we formalize a language. I don't even think people use natural language to issue commands often. Commanding people is often considered rude.