Hacker News Reader

Comment by la_oveja | Hacker News Reader

> Even in a car, being able to control the windscreen wipers, radio, ask how much fuel is left are all tasks it would be useful to do conversationally.

are you REALLY sure you want that?

how much fuel there is is a quick glance into the dash, and you can control precisely the radio volume without even looking.

'turn up the volume', 'turn down the volume a little bit', 'a bit more',...

and then a radio ad going 'get yourself a 3 pack of the new magic wipers...' and car wipers going off.

id hate conversational ui on my car.

View on HN

If the choice for controls is touchscreen vs conversational, conversational wins by a mile. However if physical buttons and dials are an option there's really no competing with that.

I wish car manufacturers stopped with the touchscreen bullshit, but it seems more likely that they'll try to offset the terrible experience with voice controls.

It’s less common now that car controls have somewhat standardized, but I’m old enough that I remember when rental cars were a pain because it would start raining and you couldn’t find the windshield wipers.

Conversational interfaces are great for rarely used features or when the user doesn’t know how to do something. For repetitive, common tasks they’re terrible.

But nobody is using ChatGPT for repetitive tasks. In fact the whole LLM revolution seems to be about letting users accomplish tasks without having to learn how to do them. Which I know some people look down on, but it’s the literal definition of management (which, to be fair, some people also look down on).

> It’s less common now that car controls have somewhat standardized, but I’m old enough that I remember when rental cars were a pain because it would start raining and you couldn’t find the windshield wipers.

This is a problem of standardization across manufacturers, not something inherent in physical controls. I never have a problem using the steering wheel in a rental car because they're all the same.

You'd have the same problem with voice interfaces: For some rental cars, turning on the wipers would be "Turn on the wipers". For others, you'd have to say "Activate the wipers." For others, "Enable the windshield wipers." There is no way manufacturers will be capable of standardizing on a single phrase.

That's kinda the point. Previously they couldnt but with an LLM driven conversational interface they wouldnt have to standardize - all of those phrases would turn on the wipers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com