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Discovery is IMO the biggest reason why voice interfaces will never take off. Mapping the space of possible solutions is delegated to your brain. You are respo
by artpi 6y ago
Discovery is IMO the biggest reason why voice interfaces will never take off.
Mapping the space of possible solutions is delegated to your brain. You are responsible for remembering what's possible, what you can do, and what you should say to make that happen.
The majority of the time you will fail, because you forgot what the magic spell actually was.
Visual interface has an unobtrusive way of showing you what you can do. More importantly - it can show you multliple options at once. Voice feedback can only tell you one thing at a time and very slowly.
Voice assistants are called that for a reason - core assumption is that you share your intent, and assistant is smart enough to make that happen.
But that does not work with people either! Nobody can read your mind (yet) - that is why project requirements and management exists. I would love to tell my team one sentence of what I want done, but I have to review that at some point.
I am not using voice assistant to do human things badly. I want it to do computer things well.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoLooks like a good article. I'll look more closely in a bit. Re. your comment about discovery, I use an old version of a voice recognition software (dragon). From the help: "Say "What Can I Say?" to see a list of sample commands you can say in the current application you are using" So not a problem, at least in voice transcription software. From the article criticising recognition loss in brevity, which is very true: > “Paste” is almost never detected correctly. Yup, so dragon simply expands the phrase to "paste that". It uses such redundancy to fix the problem, and because words are cheap (if you have no voice disability) this IME works well. I have to say, having used dragon a long time now, I don't see much value in voice command interfaces primarily but it totally shines in plain old text transcription.