Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

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This was my immediate thought when they released chatgpt plugins. They had this little demo where it generated a recipe, pulled the calories from wolfram alpha and then generated a one click to order link for doordash.

It's no stretch of the imagination that this will replace many, if not most app ui's. For the time being there's still some programs that are much better off with a dedicated interface, but the future where the starting point for most day-to-day computer interactions is a unified natural language text input is very near.

It's striking to me how close this matches the depiction in the movie "Her".

Messenger apps like telegram do have an opportunity here, but I think the most likely way for this to play out is that apple and google will eventually make their assistants the front and center way of interacting with your phone and their won't be much that messenger apps can do about it, even if they are substantially faster at implementing this.

Will natural language be a predominate form of interface in the near future? Absolutely yes. But will it replace majority of interface? I am doubtful.

The reason for my doubt is that if you look around yourself; you will see a variety of amazing human computer and human machine interfaces, because no single interface has been universally suitable and more importantly the most or even reasonably efficient for all use cases. There is little reason to believe human language is an exception.

Switches, buttons, knobs, joysticks, motion sensors, and an array of other interfaces will persist until brain-computer interface is ubiquitous.

This is sort of a "what's a computer" question. I find that for a number of specialized digital interfaces, I don't want natural language. I don't want to stand there and talk to my microwave, I just want to punch in the number. I'd say about half the time I sit down at my TV I don't know what I want to watch, I want to scroll through some options. It feels like the more specialized the purpose, the less likely I am to want to talk to it.

> It feels like the more specialized the purpose, the less likely I am to want to talk to it.

This is the essence of it; and it follows not just for "shouldn't be a computer" appliances but also software. People in tech tend of to forget about the array of hyper-specialist software that exists in the wild, from little point of sales to industrial machines.

I have little interest in talking to a coffee machine or automated transport ticket machine. Flat White. Day ticket. That would do, thanks.

Uh, I might have a language barrier here. Doesn't predominate imply a majority?

But besides this I do see your point. Mechanical interaction with buttons, switches, dials and the like offer a great interface and they haven't been universally replaced by touch screens for a reason.

I was thinking more of the ubiquity of specialised phone apps. I checked my phone just now and I have apps for public transport (i.e. train tickets and routes), taxis/ubers, multiple apps for ordering food, fitness/workout tracking, todo apps, calendars, smart home control, weather, general search, news and lots more. I'd say that most uses of most of those apps would be more convenient through a single chat like interface.

> Messenger apps like telegram do have an opportunity here, but I think the most likely way for this to play out is that apple and google will eventually make their assistants the front and center way of interacting with your phone

Wasn't the Allo app supposed to do that?

Made by Google the company who threw away an existing social network (Reader) to build a social network (Google+) that they threw away as soon as many enough had figured it out and started loving it.

(I'm still looking for a replacement for Google+.)

101% chance Apple puts Siri's brother Shrini in iMessage as a default option. I'm calling it now

Now Google... put em in Gmail and Calendar webapps as a sidebar integration and a big-ass button on mobile

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