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Comment by bijowo1676 | Hacker News Reader

Voice interface is the future, just have voice assistant do everything without relying on knobs nor touch screen

same way people just talk to claude code via whisper

Lordy I hope not. Cannot imagine having to childproof my car's entertainment system, or make sure I don't sing a trigger word, or try to turn on the defroster to dehumidify the windshield during an intense rain storm where I can barely hear myself think.

Also: I don't want a microphone in my car at all times. Thank you.

It could use array microphone to detect that the sound originates from the driver's seat (in addition to using it for filtering out not-from-driver's-seat sounds).

I mean that's cool, if it actually works reliably. Automation tech enthusiasts are willing to be impressed by 99% reliability. To get buy-in from regular people, it needs to just work better. To be clear, I don't know how reliable this actually is now, but I'd be willing to bet that it's not reliable enough.

Then it seems like we should work on making it better instead of just trashing the idea?

Both could be possible. It belongs in an R&D lab unless and until it's good enough. If, after some time and dollar threshold, it's still not good enough there might be a case for spending those resources elsewhere.

Tesla has a button that activates microphone only when you want it (like push-to-talk)

Hell no. I'd sooner tear out my own vocal cords than accept this future.

No. No, please, no. I won't buy a car that relies on voice for anything, and I really don't want to rent one either. Wildly inefficient, slow, unpredictable.

Voice makes sense as a third input mode, but it seems like a poor replacement for the controls you need while stressed or time-constrained. In a car the real UX test isn't "can the system eventually understand me?", it's "can I do this eyes-free, in noise, with high confidence, in under a second?" That's why defrost, wipers, volume, and temperature feel fundamentally different from "navigate to X". Touch is fine for discoverability, voice is fine for occasional commands, but safety-critical/high-frequency actions still want dedicated hardware.

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