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Comment by smy20011 | Hacker News Reader

smy20011

I don't think so. Chat based interface is horrible on phone. You have to type what you want instead of tapping things.

Chatbot should be part of your ui instead of replacing the ui.

I hear this often, but you don't need to surface the output of an LLM as chat

I made https://notionsmith.ai and technically it's "chat based", but the user isn't exposed to 99% of the chatting: the only chat interface on the site is there more as a bonus feature than anything.

I agree your app shouldn’t be labeled 100% a chat bot, but the primary method of interacting with it is via natural language, which is the fundamental difference the article is describing.

> You have to type what you want instead of tapping things.

On phones, I'd expect that voice will be a more popular input method than virtual keyboards.

That works in isolation, but not when you're not home. Do you want to talk to your phone in a public restroom, or the subway, or in the office?

From what I've observed, people have no problem talking to other people in public places. I don't see why this behavior would change for non-human listeners.

I regularly use speech-to-text transcription publicly. With my mouth close to the mic, I can speak softly enough that people outside of my personal space can't hear.

That being said, keyboards still have their place. Certainly, I use ChatGPT on my phone several times a week using keyboard input, and it's not particularly onerous.

Personally I’m mildly disturbed at the legion of people currently staring at and tapping at their phones suddenly switching to muttering at them.

Once your chat voice listener can access your private information like bank accounts, etc., I imagine things will listen to you everywhere. Perhaps every phone or device will be listening like Find My Devices except being Take My Money.

People do that already. It's just that when they do so it's normally a phone call.

There's no reason people couldn't make interfaces that use the same speaker as a phone call does.

It’s not really convenient in many situations.

Maybe instead of a keyboard of letters there is an array of words to build commands from.

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