Verbal communication is complex. There’s a big list of interesting challenges to tackle. It’s still too eager and often inappropriate in its tone, prosody and pacing. The timing of when it responds is wrong more often than right. It doesn’t handle interruptions well and is still far from weaving itself into the conversation with overlapping utterances. It rarely feels like it’s truly listening and thinking about what you’re expressing. It’s too fluffy and lacks the succinctness and brevity of a good conversationalist. Its personality is inconsistent. Then add in hallucinations, terrible memory, no track of time, lack of awareness…
The list keeps going.
I believe the community can make meaningful progress on all of these.
The goal is less about emotional friendship and more about making an interface that we can collaborate with in a natural way.
Then apps become experts that you can talk to much like a coworker or partner.
The models are already powerful enough to do so many things. But finding the right prompt is often tricky and time consuming.
Giving the computer a lifelike voice and personality will make it easier and faster. Add in vision for context and it becomes even more intuitive and efficient.
I’m more convinced than ever that we’re at the cusp of a new interface.