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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this perspective. I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights" "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" likewise chatting through directing it to build something or solve a problem, voice or typing will each have their place.

And video calling did take off, plenty of people use facetime and almost everybody working in an office uses some form of video calls. Criticizing the early attempts at getting video calling working because they hadn't taken off yet (I remember them being advertised on "video phones" with 56k modems), of course someone was going to have the idea and implement before it was quite reasonable.

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> I can't imaging a point where I won't want to ask "what's the weather like?" "please turn off the lights"

To help with understanding that perspective, I cannot imagine a scenario where I would ask a device connected to the internet to turn off the lights. I literally never wanted this. A physical switch is a 100% non negotiable for me. I feel the same way about non-mechanical car doors.

Perhaps due to that outlook I was always puzzled about the entire idea of an "assistant". It's interesting for me to see, that there are people out there who actually want that "assistant".

You don't watch Iron Man and want a JARVIS? Current systems are pretty far away from that, but that's the overall draw.

I don't watch superhero stuff. But even with a more classical example of Space Odyssey 2001 - a talking computer has never been something I found even remotely interesting. It took me months to give LLMs a serious try due to this.

I guess everybody's different. I personally like the idea of being able to, say, ask what events I have on my calendar for the day while I'm getting dressed, and be able to get a summary and then engage in followup conversation about it. Or have a little reminder that says, it's time to leave in a few minutes, would you like to turn on your car's climate control? It's not to replace my normal computer usage with a voice interface, but to add new capabilities.

The switch is a necessity.

Ever end up cooking or something when the phone/doorbell rings and you want to pause the music? Have your hands full and wanted to open a door? Hear the weather and then the news as you brew coffee or put your shoes on (without interaction with a bright screen)?

You should save some money and keep some privacy doing it your way :)

Have you never... asked a person a question? to do something for you? to pass the salt? what time it was?

Maybe you're a little strange but it cannot be that much of a stretch for you to consider using speech to ask for things.

Not wanting to hide things behind Internet connected computers is fine, being unable to imagine wanting to use your voice to ask for things is a little silly.

Not OP but for me it comes down to "asking a person" ≠ "asking a device". Besides just to be pedantic one of the thing you've described is not something an llm would be able to do, and for the second one... That's what watches and clocks are for. You don't need to have a datacenter running smwh in the world or a beefy PC to take a glance at the time. If you think you do, I personally wouldn't call others "a little strange" if I were you.

I am not sure if you are stupid or trying to sound like a stupid person. Have I ever asked a person a question? That's what you are asking me after I said I don't want a computer assistant? And you call me strange? Can you take your passive aggressiveness and shove it up your ass?

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