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...it's difficult to see why you'd still want to occupy your hands... Bandwidth. You have several degrees of freedom with each hand, with each finger. You ha

...it's difficult to see why you'd still want to occupy your hands... Bandwidth. You have several degrees of freedom with each hand, with each finger. You have one linear stream with voice. Latency. You can flick a switch in a few milliseconds, but saying "turn off the lights" or "lights off" takes half a second or more. Privacy. You can overhear a voice command. You can't overhear (very easily) a buttonpress or touchscreen swipe. Accuracy. Even with perfect voice transcription, people misspeak easily more than they mistype. And mistyping can be corrected within a few letters, while misspeaking will require interrupting the stream to switch the voice UI into editing mode or something.

Joe-Z 9y ago
See, but you're still thinking in current voice-interface terms. If I want to edit something that I "misspelled" (if this will even be a problem, since you are _talking_) I'll just tell my digital secretary "errr, I meant <x>" and it will know what to do. Same for turning off the lights: Sure, it's faster if you only consider the flicking of the switch. It's another thing if you also incorporate the time it takes you to get up from your couch/bed/wherever you are without a light switch in arm's reach. You definitely have a point with privacy though. Also, the volume of all people on a train talking to their smart assistants (though the question remains if this is really so much different from people talking to other people on a train). EDIT: I misread your point about mistyping vs. misspeaking. Still, the interface I'm talking about does not work in modes. It's able to truly understand you and interpret your commands appropriately.
brownbat 9y ago
> "switch the voice UI into editing mode or something" It still really bugs me how bad UI systems are at error correction. We have a series of conventions to do this efficiently in spoken English, inflections, quick utterances that call out specific ambiguous syllables, context (the hard one, sure). Even on a smartphone, if the system guessed a certain word when I swiped it, then I delete the word and enter it again, maybe stop guessing the same word every time? I think you're right that typing will be more effective in general, but I still see so many areas where the gap could be closed a little more.
gowld 9y ago
If you can speak 10x as fast as you type, that cancels out 10x bus size in handwidth. Correcting typing on a phone in very hard.

Joe-Z 9y ago

See, but you're still thinking in current voice-interface terms. If I want to edit something that I "misspelled" (if this will even be a problem, since you are _talking_) I'll just tell my digital secretary "errr, I meant <x>" and it will know what to do. Same for turning off the lights: Sure, it's faster if you only consider the flicking of the switch. It's another thing if you also incorporate the time it takes you to get up from your couch/bed/wherever you are without a light switch in arm's reach. You definitely have a point with privacy though. Also, the volume of all people on a train talking to their smart assistants (though the question remains if this is really so much different from people talking to other people on a train). EDIT: I misread your point about mistyping vs. misspeaking. Still, the interface I'm talking about does not work in modes. It's able to truly understand you and interpret your commands appropriately.

brownbat 9y ago

> "switch the voice UI into editing mode or something" It still really bugs me how bad UI systems are at error correction. We have a series of conventions to do this efficiently in spoken English, inflections, quick utterances that call out specific ambiguous syllables, context (the hard one, sure). Even on a smartphone, if the system guessed a certain word when I swiped it, then I delete the word and enter it again, maybe stop guessing the same word every time? I think you're right that typing will be more effective in general, but I still see so many areas where the gap could be closed a little more.

gowld 9y ago

If you can speak 10x as fast as you type, that cancels out 10x bus size in handwidth. Correcting typing on a phone in very hard.