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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

Love it! Voice interaction is a great modality for UI. A lot of people have a bad taste left over from early attempts but I expect to see a lot of progress made now that STT and natural language understanding is so much better.

The biggest reason we should be adding conversational UI to everything is the harm done by RSI and sedentary keyboard and mouse interfaces. We're crippling entire generations of people by sticking to outdated hardware. The good news is we can break free of this now that we have huge improvements in LLMs and AR hardware. We'll be back to healthy levels of activity in 5 to 10 years. Sorry Keeb builders, it's time to join the stamp collectors and typewriter enthusiasts. We'll be working in the park today.

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I'd like to see a voice instruction layer that can work independently of the mouse/keyboard later without stealing focus. Things like moving files or preparing windows/positioning prior to switching.

One big problem would be that in open office environments there would be a lot of noise. I wonder if some sort of active noise cancellation could be introduced so the voices of your co-workers could be ~completely canceled out if you are wearing special headphones?

When I consider my own LLM workflow the amount of time reading/listening/thinking outweighs the amount of time spent typing/speaking. If that's any indication of how a fully fledged conversational workflow would work then I think open plan offices wouldn't be a lot louder than they currently are. Depending on how quickly agentic LLMs are developed I'm not even sure we will be using offices the same way we are now. We might only need to meet or checkin with our coworkers and our LLM agents every few hours or once a day or maybe even longer in order to realign and check on results. Maybe we'll get occasional messages asking us to confirm something or provide clarification, I could honestly see most knowledge work evaporating and leaving behind only high level coordination, research and ideation.

Before that, I'm certain we'll all be spending a lot more time reviewing work, trying out prototypes and tweaking prompts or specifications than we do typing or talking.

Have you tried sitting in a park for hours, talking out loud and seeing what happens?

Ignoring the snark. This will change as technology is adopted, go back 40 years (or even less) and a person walking around staring at a little black rectangle would have been perceived as weird and anti-social. We used to make fun of people talking on the phone via bluetooth headsets and now everyone does it with AirPods or whatever.

If you've got the technology to enable you to seamlessly transition from working in your home to working while sitting outside at a cafe to working while sitting on a blanket under a tree in the park to working wherever you feel like it then there will be enough brave people that say "fuck what other people think" and just do it so they can enjoy being active and getting fresh air and eventually more and more people will join them. Eventually we'll reach the point where sitting inside at a desk for 8-12 hours will be the weird thing.

Isn't that just like taking a phone call? I'm not sure what you're trying to imply.

I guess there are differences from country to country, but in some places you would not be left alone.

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