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25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
- KorematsuFred 6y agoVery unlikely I will ever talk to my computer irrespective of how good the speed technology gets. If I have to talk to my computer how will I work in crowded places ? How does it work ?
- gpm 6y agoWear some sort of sound containing bubble around your head, fits in nicely with the whole pandemic thing :)
- pessimizer 6y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=stenomask&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stenomask&ia=images&iax=images
- zerop 6y agoIn a croweded place the noise has to be cancelled or speech recognition application must learn to recognise with noise in input audio.
- ch4s3 6y agoI think the real problem is social, no one wants to hear you talking at your computer in a coffee shop.
- onion2k 6y agoThat would quickly change if people actually wanted to do it though. Social norms are just unwritten agreements - if enough people decide to dictate their novels and blog posts in coffeeshops then the default will quickly change so talking is acceptable.
- gpm 6y agoI think you underestimate the resistance. The problem isn't just that people don't want to do it, it's also that people don't want other people to do it because it's annoying. It might pass in a coffee shop, it probably won't in an airplane, it will almost certainly never pass in a library. People will try it regardless of the appropriateness of the location, because some people aren't aware or are assholes, and as a result the entire technology will get a bad rap. See google glass as an example.
- perryizgr8 6y agoPeople talk to each other all the time in coffee shops. If talking to your computer becomes as natural as talking to a friend, why won't it be acceptable in a shop?
- gpm 6y agoPeople talk to each other all the time in airplanes too, and even libraries, but it turns out that people are both more understanding of people talking to other humans currently present (rather than say on a cell phone) and people are better at talking to other humans currently present respectfully than they are at talking to devices (or at least people via devices, but I think we can extrapolate). I agree if it was already the social norm it wouldn't be a problem (same with Google glass), but it turns out that the technology being ready isn't always enough to make the social norms change.
- bena 6y agoI think part of the issue is that we're pretty good at focusing and filtering. If we're trying, we can focus on a single voice when the room is noisy. The computer doesn't know which to choose and all voices seem equally important.
- theonlybutlet 6y agoI've often asked Google assistant in packed bars and it works great.
- jldugger 6y agoIf you had two mics, you could probably work out a filter that captures audio roughly 'in front of the laptop' which would probably work well enough. But I think the wins are going to be in places where you don't normally have a computer, where a mouse and keyboard aren't natural companions to the task at hand. Yes, some environments will be noisy enough that speaking is a bad modality, but not all of them.
- duhi88 6y agoNo, the point is that you'd be annoying the people around you if you were talking to your computer the whole time.
- jldugger 6y agoThat is a lot of reading into the question that was actually asked: "how does it work?"
- KorematsuFred 6y agoI do not see the advantage of talking to computer. I can see the advantage of talking to my Google mini in my bathroom while I am showering. I see the advantage of asking my car to change music while driving. But literally zero advantages of talking to my laptop. My hands can move lot faster than my mouth. I can set shortcuts that help me do things lot faster than the whole pain of talking to the computer.
- KorematsuFred 6y agoSorry I was not clear. The problem here is that I am annoying other people and I am getting annoyed by other people around me. Imagine saying "Hey Computer, what is my credit card bill for this year", "Hey Computer, Open word",
- jldugger 6y agoShades of that asshole in line at Starbucks holding conference call over a bluetooth headset.
- sixothree 6y agoEven at home without any risk of disturbing coworkers, it would have to be extremely intuitive to offer any speed advantage. I can open Microsoft Word faster than I can say "open microsoft word". It would have to be smart enough to short circuit the entire process of doing something useful with Word.
- pessimizer 6y agoYou're not thinking creatively enough. Part of the technology would be to disable any other way of opening Word.
- dheera 6y agoA big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent Instagram photos tagged at a location within a 10 mile radius of Mt. Shasta?" These are all things I would expect a computer assistant to do really well. They have access to so much data, and so many APIs, that they should be able to break down these sentences into a SQL-like query and give me results. The third, for example: "recent Instagram photos" -> Instagram has an API "tagged within a 10 mile radius" -> parse the cities within a 10 mile radius and look for tags in all of them "people" -> use your wonderful person detection networks your friends at Waymo developed "wearing masks" -> I'm sure your internal datasets have this label, so run an object detector Then compile and reduce the data to give me the number I want. That's what I want an assistant to do. But it couldn't even do the first, which just involves a single API query to fetch air quality index information. Bleh. And as for the second, it has no idea what "last gas station" or "mountain pass" means; it's a query a human would know to be extremely commonplace. It turns out that the current generation of "assistants" are mostly just template-matchers which really doesn't help me much at all. I can set my own alarms, thank you.
- jkaptur 6y ago> I can set my own alarms, thank you. And not only that, but a specialized user interface is often preferable to voice even when the assistant passes the Turing test. There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.
- dreamer7 6y agoThat doesn't seem correct. People prefer apps because they are better at providing the information we need (menus, products, services etc) and the alternative for engaging through calls is either talking with overworked humans or a painful IVR service. For me, the ideal interface to engage (order something, create a note etc) when you know what you want is through speech. It just feels so effortless.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI will consider talking to my computer when my computer is the only one that would hear me. I also never talk to my phone.
- saiya-jin 6y agosame here, what's the point of using things like Facebook container in Firefox and blocking Google tracking as much as I can, and then happily share my private life with them in even more direct way
- zarq 6y agohttp://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20120322 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20120322
- sp332 6y agoYeah, it's weird to have a conversation with someone else listening. But I will bring it in if I'm discussing something with another person, and want to look something up. It feels more normal to have a voice interface involved when I'm already talking.
- detritus 6y agoI dearly wish I could have a Speech Recognition aspect to the 'creative' and CAD-like software I use - I think it would be fantastic to be able to do two or three operations 'at the same time' - eg. click an object with the mouse, hit ctrl on the keyboard to lock to some plain or angle, as I use the mouse to move, or whatever, whilst verbally instructing the software to 'zoom viewport out' or achieve whatever other function that is vaguely complicated or buried in the GUI somewhere. Otherwise, I have absolutely no desire to 'talk' to my computer and have it understand me, unless that tech comes packaged with an empathic AI module so I can tell it off and repay it a small percentage of the emotional pain computers have inflicted upon me over the decades.
- stainforth 6y agoJust because this thread is dealing with user interaction in general, I do know there are also foot pedals people use as modifiers or input actions along the lines of what you're saying.
- detritus 6y agoThanks - I've played around with tertiary inputs a couple of times over the years, from MIDI-based level boards to a '3D' input device for CAD. The speech recognition would be, I think, ideal for function interactions harder to describe than that which a switch or a level could achieve - eg "Fill highlighted image with Red and make 50% transparent" or something. The critical benefit would be to be able to do this whilst at the same time 'controlling' the focus with a mouse and keyboard at the same time.
- zerop 6y agoThere are good use cases apart from Dictation for Speech tech: 1. Voice based operations in factories, construction workers who want to have both the hands free but want to navigate via a device 2. Use cases while Driving. E.g. A Driver who is delivering goods. 3. Call centre - Analytics of audio calls etc. Can have many use cases 4. Voice assistant like Alexa, Siri. Mind that Alexa, Siri have vision to do more than just Music. 5. Any use case where visual interface is either not there or visual is not an easy option for user. Speech tech is challenging when you have to deal with noise or want to do Speech to text on lw profile devices (on the edge).
- nottorp 6y ago> 1. Voice based operations in factories, construction workers who want to have both the hands free but want to navigate via a device They can't understand speech properly in a quiet environment, and you want them to get your commands on a factory floor or construction site? :)
- iamgopal 6y agoUnderstanding speech ( language context) is much harder problem I think.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoI've had a similar experience, worked in voice for a long time. I simply have no desire whatsoever to speak to my electronics, I don't find it helpful or useful in anyway.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoI'm not quite that extreme, but I'd use voice if it was at least as smart as a human. And it isn't - yet. "Turn on the lights" isn't exciting. "Make dinner and do the laundry" would be exciting, but that's at least 25 years and some major advances in robotics away. IoT is very crude and contrived compared to what would be possible with an active technology that could do useful physical things of all kinds.
- im3w1l 6y agoFor something like that I'd rather press a button or have it happen on a timer. Where it could really shine is in more rare commands. "Make me some Pad Thai". Unless you're a huge fan, you wont want a button for this. And it's faster to say than type into your phone.
- wolco2 6y agoThe problem is we (as in hn) can type faster than we can think of the words to describe. My wife always talks to google. It seems backwards to me. Next generation should skip speaking and wireless read thoughts. Language/speaking is a bottleneck.
- himinlomax 6y agoGood point. I never use speech commands for the same reason I don't use handwriting recognition. I just hate hand writing, typing is my default mode of operating a machine. I can't play with a joystick either, come to think about it.
- jowsie 6y agoComparing creative work to turning on a lamp or checking the weather doesn't seem quite right to me
- memling 6y ago> The problem is we (as in hn) can type faster than we can think of the words to describe. Do you suppose it's possible that speed isn't really what counts? In the era of typewriters, authors like C. S. Lewis opined that typing obscured their thinking because it was too fast. It didn't let them savor the words effectively. Maybe what we really need is to slow down?
- 542354234235 6y ago> Maybe what we really need is to slow down? In some cases, we should slow down. But in general, I disagree. Especially because of the way in which we use technology now. Our smart phones are becoming a bit of an external brain to us. It holds contacts, conversations, searches, notes, musings, etc. We use it to recall a fact or answer a question without really even thinking about it. Maybe what we really need is to slow don’t think it is only a problem now because smart phones and the like aren’t really designed to improve our lives, but as ad delivery platforms to manipulate us into buying products and services we probably don’t need. I would love better tech that helped offload mental tasks my human brain isn’t great at, but computer brains are, and let me focus on things my human brain is good at as well as things I just would rather think about.
- ska 6y agoWe've been pretty good at word recognition for a while - speech not so much. Conflating the two has lead to a lot of confusion.
- hobofan 6y agoWord recognition and sentence recognition. It's honestly quite shocking how sparse the research and implementations for everything is once you go beyond a single sentence/command that you shout at your personal assistants.
- ska 6y agoThat's fair, NLP has done decently with mechanical deconstruction of normal sentences for quite a while now. But as you note, mapping that onto a template for response is a long way from "understanding".
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoFrames used to be an idea in AI, but they seem to have been sidelined and possibly forgotten now. Frames mean that words and sentences have a context, and you can't understand conversations unless you understand the context. This starts from simple and obvious distinctions. E.g. - as a silly example - "make dinner" usually means "Prepare and cook an evening meal". But if you have a project called "dinner" it might mean "build and compile 'dinner'" An AGI should be able to understand the difference, and ask for clarification if it doesn't. Eventually you end up with subtextual and implied communication - e.g. "I'm fine" can mean two completely opposite things depending on tone of voice and the contents of minutes-to-years of previous conversations. All of this is many orders of magnitude harder to handle than "Bedroom lights off."
- hobofan 6y agoOh, I didn't mean AGI levels of understanding, but even "simple" technical things that are likely building blocks necessary to get to that point like sentence boundary detection.
- sidpatil 6y agoIn my opinion, the speech-driven computing in Star Trek is the best depiction of the technology. The interaction is very fluid, low-latency, and accurate, and the system doesn't force itself on you: there are still plenty of non-speech-based user interfaces to be found all over a starship.
- Catsandkites 6y agoQuestion: Can I write my own assistant on mobile devices that is an actual assistant? As in, can listen for the key activation word in the background? Like the "official" assistants. As far as I can tell, the assistant APIs seem to be like plugins? On Android for example, it appears custom assistants still run through Google assistant. I want to be able to say "TriggerWord, do X and Y" and the OS activates my app, passes the voice sample and I take care of all the language processing from there. Which doesn't seem possible...
- bserge 6y agohttps://snowboy.kitt.ai/ https://snowboy.kitt.ai/ is about the only good third party hotword detection engine. You can hook it into Assistant with a bit of work, and with Tasker/Automate and a rooted phone, you can open apps, press buttons, pass voice commands, and more. Imo, Assistant is limited because of privacy, see how it asks you to opt in for a more personalized experience and it still won't unlock your phone for you.
- canada_dry 6y agoThe custom home automation system I built relies on google's (very good) off-line voice recognition + automagic [i] + opencv face detection. I did not want the home asst listening all the time - as it's highly likely to falsely trigger just listening to radio or tv it... so instead I use python+opencv to detect if the assistant (an old rooted samsung note) is being directly looked at - then it wakes up to listen for the trigger word and the command. Of course, I can also manually trigger it via any device in the house. [i] http://automagic4android.com/ http://automagic4android.com/
- payne92 6y agoThis is a great example of "it's not my preferred mode, so it must not be anyone else's." Dictation is widely used in medical transcription. Dictation is a killer way to write a first draft quickly, transcribe rough written notes after a meeting, etc. Also, about half of my emails are dictated, and I know I'm not the only one. It takes some time to get used to, but once you're there (like touch typing!), you can't go back. ..etc..
- Finnucane 6y agoI can barely manage to talk to people. Why on earth would I want to talk to a box?
- bserge 6y agoIt might be a good way to learn to talk to people, or just talk... Actually, just use Discord for that, join random servers and the voice chats.
- marricks 6y agoThere's lots of reason it hasn't taken off like some hoped (accuracy, social aspects, privacy) but it's not faster unless you have no other option for input. If I have a computer, typing is faster, if I have a phone, which we almost always do, it's faster to trigger the command or type. Speech is competing against every other tech item trying to be convenient, from laptops to phones to watches... the only space where I'd want it is something like baking or cooking when I can't interface with a computer. (edit) and what about the response back? A visual interface I can confirm at a glance whether my input was accurate, a voice one I have to listen to the whole thing. I even don't like maps directions in the car as half the time I know the next direction already and don't want the interruption to music or whatever I'm listening to.
- nshm 6y agoMeanwhile Google trains their systems on 3 million hours of Youtube audio gaining 30% better accuracy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12096 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12096 It improves much faster than you might think.
- jefftk 6y agoTo avoid wrist pain, I have started dictating quite a lot as a way to enter large amounts of text into my laptop and phone. It's really very good, especially on android. Aside from the relatively large downside of it being noisy, I like it almost as much as I did typing.
- gxqoz 6y agoDo you find yourself going back and revising what you've dictated? When I type, I'm frequently pausing, going to other parts of the document, and deleting things I've already written. All of these actions I find more annoying when dictating. Not to mention some of the baffling Random capitalization Choices and, over/under insertion of punctuation. In general, I find dictation useful on my phone to take notes to myself. And maybe to send a message in a chat situation. But it just doesn't work for me for anything slightly more formal / long.
- 542354234235 6y agoJust say "dictated but not read" at the end and leave all the mistakes in there. Problem solved.
- jefftk 6y agoI do need to go back and fix problems, such as poor handling of punctuation on android and poor handling of capitalization on Mac. Fixing a few things is much less work on my wrists than typing the whole thing out, however, so I'm still much happier with speech to text. At this point I'm dictating even my (work) design docs and (personal) blog posts. I do think I'm a bit less fluent when using speech to text, because it's harder for me to jump around and make slight word choice improvements, but not by much?
- fred_is_fred 6y agoProgress does seem very slow since I could first talk to an Android phone - which was at least 10 years ago. I'm using iPhones now but even simple things such as "show me pictures of a Boeing 737" or "call the Home Depot on 1st Avenue in Amarillo" only have about a 50% success rate - enough that unless my hands are actively busy, I'd rather just type it.
- fareesh 6y agoVoice activated code snippets or command line switches would be nice. "Hey ffmpeg crop the first 15 seconds of input.mp4 and increase the volume by 15%". Modular so I can switch out the speech recognition and the NLP and fulfillment
- singularity2001 6y agoBetty tried that: https://github.com/pickhardt/betty https://github.com/pickhardt/betty
- sida 6y agoOne thing I haven't seen discussed is the poor affordance / discoverability of speech technology. Google Home can do some clever things however, it also does not have the ability to do some very basic stuff. As a user, how do you know what Google Home can do and cannot do? It is just trial and error. And if Google Home introduces a new feature to be able to complete new types of queries. What now? How does a user know that last month it wasn't able to do something and this month it is able to do that thing. And lastly, the interface of voice is very clunky. It has no concept of temporal memory like Me: "Ok Google, navigate to the nearest safeway" Google: "navigating you to the nearest gas station" The natural thing to say is "no, I meant safeway nott gas station" however, I now have to say "Ok Google, navigate to the nearest safeway". This is analogous to if keyboard had no backspace and you have to retype everything everytime you have a typo. Well that's the state of speech technology right now
- gugagore 6y agoWhat you say about "temporal memory" is not exactly true for Google's assistant. You can try two separate queries 1. "Who is the president of the United States?" 2. "What is his wife's name?" And it will resolve the deictic pronoun. I haven't tried this feature out extensively, but it has worked for a few years now.
- dalbasal 6y agoAgreed. More broadly, I'd say that no one has made a good UI yet. The mac/lisa/star had a UI that people could learn. iOS... In some ways a voice UI has bigger problems to deal with than PC GUIs or iOS. Those UIs were replacing pre-existing UIs (eg blackberry, dos, unix, norton) and they could target whatever tasks a smartphone/PC needed to do. For voice UIs, it's a cold start. It's not even obvious what an audio only computer should do. Our mental model for a "virtual assistant" is a person-2-person exchange, and computers still aren't great at communicating like people. FWIW, I think slipping into existing niches is the way to go. That's where a useful voice ui will be discovered. Car stuff, accessibility software, living room controls.. At least these have clear goals. Voice operating spotify, netflix or just an iphone is something people actually need and will use if its useful.
- RunningDroid 6y ago
- josefresco 6y agoJust this morning on my way to work: "Hey Siri, remind me to take my meds at lunch" Siri created a reminder (good) called "Take my meds at lunch" - no time (bad), just a simple reminder. I saw this post, looked at the time and wondered why Siri didn't remind me, given it was 1:00 - now I know to be more specific but in reality I'll just stop trying like most people.
- toolslive 6y agoBack in the days (80s) they were joking about the programming languages used in early (star trek) holodecks. > (1st attempt) "Computer! coffee please" > (computer dumps coffee on Kirk) "argh!" > (2nd attempt) "Computer! coffee in a mug please" > (3rd attempt) "Computer! hot coffee in a mug please" .... > (25th attempt) "Computer! 10cl of coffee at 50C with 3cl of fresh milk at 6C in a bottoms down ceramic mug of 15cl"
- XCSme 6y agoThis means that you whould only be able to choose between several (discrete) choices instead of assigning the computer random tasks. But when the number of such choices is really small (eg. make coffee), then a simple physical button to initiate the task is better in almost every way.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago“Computer. Press the coffee button.”
- bluedino 6y agoI'd like to go back in time and fire up Dragon Dictation and see how far we've came. The Pentium processor's power over the 486 was supposed to be the missing link to 'working' text to speech.
- smnrchrds 6y agoPlease let me know of the results when you do. It unfortunately doesn't have a free trial.
- h2odragon 6y agoPetty gouda wince thestraining fun. AFAIK it was at the level of super funky chording keyboards; with a lot of investment it could be a cool and impressive input method, but the personal investment side was too much for most users. There was an "assistive technology" user base that i dont think they ever realized they had.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoI always type at my computer, and 90% of the time use voice dictation on my phone because I don't text enough to be good at it. Google's voice capture often astonishes me with its accuracy, and nearly as often makes me laugh at how bad it can get things.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoI talk to my phone instead of using my thumbs quite frequently....but never to do anything serious.
- fmeyer 6y agoMy first experience with conversational tech was using IBM's via voice 98. I still speak with these modern assistants in the same spaced pace. I was surprised by google meet transcription system, which to me, it's the most accurate I've used so far. Same with the google docs dictation.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoI always thought it was a bit dumb for Google to name their voice assistant 'Google'. First you cannot ever upgrade the name, its THE name. Second, every time the assistant screws up, Google gets the blame directly tied to their name.
- sp332 6y agoIt's been a while, but I was able to get Google to recognize a different phrase by repeating it several times during the initial training.
- x87678r 6y agoI'd rather type all day than talk. But Comcast voice remote is awesome.
- awinter-py 6y agoprivacy point in the article is legit and a concern with all kinds of AI-mediated alternative input. it may mean that if you aren't comfortable sharing rich context about your life with a cloud platform, you'll get left behind by technology
- overthemoon 6y agoI suck at talking. I speak in halting, quiet sentence fragments. My mind wanders and I lose my point. I get in my head a lot. I'm much better at writing and reading as a communication method. I'm open to speech stuff, but currently no speech recognition solution meets any needs I have. Just my 2c, I'm sure other people have uses for it. The most interesting one (to me) has popped up a few times on HN, which is voice-based programming. I would love to see that mature and become more widespread, there are a few things that are annoying enough to do that if I had a voice shortcut or eye tracking it would be pretty cool.
- selestify 6y agoI do the same when talking. Never realized others have this condition as well :)
- crazygringo 6y agoFor most short interactions, the mouse/trackpad/finger is simply faster. Now for long-form typing, I'd love to use dictation and sometimes do for taking down short thoughts I e-mail myself from my iPhone. But the problem is not just that it still makes tons of mistakes. (Probably a quarter of my notes-to-self involve errors so big it's even impossible for me to later figure out what I even meant by trying to sound it out phonetically.) The problem is that I can't correct those mistakes using voice. There's no way to say "pause, correct affect to effect" or anything like that. Even more maddeningly, the words keep changing in real time. Sometimes I'll utter a sentence it gets right, then it "re-analyzes" it and completely messes half of it up. I just wish there were a kind of dictation where I could say a phrase, pause, see if it's right (and it wouldn't change after), say the wrong part with a kind of emphasis that lets the system know I'm issuing a correction, the system would look for the next most probable alternative, repeat as desired. Then I could actually dictate successfully. This UX where the words are always changing back and forth according to updated statistical probabilities, even as long as 15 seconds after I said them, and where there's no ability to go back and correct them with voice... it's just so so dumb. The problem isn't voice recognition anymore. It's voice correction.
- cameldrv 6y ago100% this. Dragon used to have more correction features, but at least the Apple dictation doesn't really have any. Even just "correct sentence" where I try again with the same sentence would be a huge improvement.
- 205guy 6y agoPicks up the mouse and speaks into it: "Computer?" Classic scene: https://youtu.be/xaVgRj2e5_s?t=171 https://youtu.be/xaVgRj2e5_s?t=171 Star Trek isn't my favorite sci-fi show/movie, but they really nailed some futurism and in this case, lack therof.
- andrewstuart 6y agoI talk to my phone in the car all the time. Hands free. "send message to john" "how far is it to" "get directions to" "play podcast" "play audiobook"
- superkuh 6y agoAnd then your phone transfers the recorded sounds to someone else's computer to do the work. You still don't talk to your computer phone. You talk through it.
- kebman 6y agoI like taking dictates for memos or writing text messages, especially when I'm walking around town and need to pay attention to traffic. It looks like I'm just on my phone as normal, so nobody sees that I'm actually just talking to myself. Sometimes the mistakes the AI maks are hillarios, but usually they're just annoying, as I need to manually edit them. But in the end, doing that takes a shorter amount of time than thumbing it in.
- aloknnikhil 6y agoIt's also the unprompted responses that has started to bug me. I don't know if Google is having a bad rollout or this is deliberate but my Google Home is being triggered a lot more often now and I don't recall anything remotely close to the wake phrase being said. Also, the responses to questions when actually prompted are not at all what I'm expecting. Particularly, Google has trouble understanding a lot of context around Spotify playlists. It still cannot distinguish between a song and an album with the same name despite me prepending the request with "Play the Song...". Overall it's just a terrible experience and that makes the whole assistant thing less like an assistant and more like a toddler that refuses to cooperate.
- munchbunny 6y agoI had this problem a lot with Cortana popping up during meetings and seizing control of my microphone. In the end I spent probably 15 minutes trying to figure out how to turn off voice activation because Microsoft doesn't make it easy.
- dguo 6y agoAudio feedback doesn’t give the user the same reassuring sense of certainty as a graphical user interface. One glance will confirm that I have typed my card number correctly, but you don’t have to be unusually impatient for your heart to sink, when you hear the inhumanly calm words, “I heard 4659 1234 1234 1234. Is that correct? Say yes or press one to confirm”. This is the main reason I rarely use voice controls. Even if voice is faster than typing for most cases, typing never fails catastrophically like voice does. I could use voice only when I'm confident it will work, but then there's the mental load of making that prediction. It's easier to just always go with typing.
- wycy 6y agoI use Siri on my phone all the time, but for one thing and one thing only: reminders. "Hey Siri, remind me in 2 hours to do X" "Hey Siri, remind me when I get home to do Y" "Hey Siri, remind me next time I go to Costco to buy Z" It's pretty quick to set up reminders by voice, especially location-based reminders. Almost anything else I'd rather do via a UI.
- frankosaurus 6y agoFor me, the thing that killed voice commands had nothing to do with speech technology. It was latency and error handling. At the start of my morning commute, I would say, "Ok Google, navigate to work". Often, this would fail because I was in the network limbo area outside my house, where my phone struggles to transition from home WiFi to data. Worst of all: The failure would be horribly slow. I would have to drive for another 30s before my phone realized, yes, we are really out of WiFi range now. And the voice command wouldn't be auto-retried. I would have to tell my phone again. It didn't remember. I added one-touch "Home" and "Work" Google Maps widgets to my home screen and never looked back. As an engineer, I realize why this is a tricky problem. As a consumer, I want it to "just work".
- wheybags 6y agoWhy would you need directions to the workplace you go to every day? Unless you're doing onsite stuff in new places every day?
- PeterisP 6y agoNot the OP, but many people use Waze etc for driving directions on everyday commute because the same destination does not imply the same route - due to construction, accidents, traffic jams, etc the best route can vary significantly, and simply driving the same route as yesterday can take much more time than it did yesterday.
- parliament32 6y agoTraffic.
- p1necone 6y agoIt took me months to work out that "navigate to X" was the magic phrase to get google maps to do what you would expect in car navigation to do. The phrase that came more naturally to me was "give me directions to X", but that only gets you to the screen with the route and you still have to manually press the "start" button with your finger. And then it would randomly pick other modes of transport unless I remember to say "by car". Systems that are inherently unrecoverable like voice commands need actual documentation.
- inventtheday 6y agoInterestingly i've noticed that my friends who are less technically savy have actually started to use voice control on a regular basis, probably because they are more easily frustrated with the existing interaction modalities
- vffhfhf 6y agoI still dont get why google doesnot integrate Google now function on google chrome. like imagine saying " Hey open a reddit/meme subreddit on the side " while you are doing your watching youtube. or imagine saying "hey Wikipedia that *"
- makecheck 6y agoThree major problems I see: 1. When these systems go offline, they’re nearly useless. One WiFi glitch and the system gives me the audio equivalent of a blank stare. This directly reduces the chance I’ll casually use voice and instead prefer my more-reliable phone. 2. Most systems haven’t figured out reasonable responses and are basically chatty and full of sounds. Make it Unix-like (silence on success = golden)!!! If I say “turn on the light” and you turn it on, I CAN SEE THE LIGHT ON so I don’t also need to hear a loud chime and some voice confirmation like “sure, no problem”! The fact that I can silently do things quickly in other ways (e.g. phone) is another strike against voice. Yet this is something they could easily fix. 3. Voice systems are not 100% perfect at comprehension yet they tend to babble out long responses. This puts me in the situation of trying to shut them up for long enough to listen for my intended query. Maybe they can improve this by erring on the side of fewer words in replies, with more pauses? Not sure.
- ryankrage77 6y agoA few years ago when Microsoft was pushing Cortana with Windows 10, I decided that since I was wearing a headset at my desk 90% of the time anyway, I may as well try using a voice assistant so I could multi-task. So next time I needed to do a calculation in the middle of something, I said "hey cortana, what's 50 times 12.5?" while typing something up... and it opened the start menu, lost focus on my window, and the searched for it on Bing in Edge. I just wanted it to read me the answer.
- ryankrage77 6y agoAnother frustrating experience with a voice assistant was with Google Assistant. I was on a train, and I didn't want to miss my stop if I got distracted (as had happened before). Since I had my headphones on, I tried getting Google assistant to notify me when I arrived at my destination. It could not do it, the devs hadn't made a template for this scenario at the time. Nowadays it might work via a location-based reminder, but I can't trust that to work within the 15 second window I have to get off the train.
- dathinab 6y agoRecently I switched on the auto-generated subtitle on a German video and it was not just bad. It was basically impossible to even guess what the original sentence was meant to be. Totally use-less technology in that case.
- juancn 6y agoThe main problem now is not speech recognition. It's a kind of uncanny valley effect. You can speak to these assistants, but the language is still restricted. They show little to no common sense. It's a lot of party tricks bundled together. You can't interrupt them and it's hard to correct them. On the speech recognition side, an issue I've found (although is a rather niche one) is triggered because I'm bilingual (I'm fluent in spanish and english). Speech recognition only works well on a single language. I have Alexa set to speak english, for example when I'm searching for a song with a spanish title, I have to try to fudge the name into a fake english pronunciation for it to produce the right phonemes that will match the song title, rather than just say the name properly. Also, if it misses the match, there's no easy way to stop it and say "No, not that one", and be presented with a list of similar matches.
- macrolime 6y agoI don't think it's a niche issue outside of the United States, in countries where English is widely known. It makes it pretty much impossible to use Siri on Apple TV for example, because so many movies or TV series are named in English but also in the local language.
- bitwize 6y agoGood. Please don't. And if you do, please don't do it in an open-plan office next to me.
- mxyzplk 6y agoIt takes all of 2 minutes trying to use alexa each day to make me stop. "Alexa, play the damn song I have you play every day, I will cite title and author to you so you don't screw it up." "A random song? OK!"
- ddingus 6y agoYou do talk to your computer. And the accuracy and speed of it has improved dramatically. Your computer has yet to process meaning. That is where we are stuck right now.
- shadowgovt 6y agoAnd on the flip-side of this story... "Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24846887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24846887) The author notes that they only get about 50% of regular speed with this approach, and that may be a significant part of the challenge---speech can encode complex concepts into a few words (especially given context), but the actual baud rate isn't particularly impressive. Keyboard interface, where possible, seems to still win out.
- blahblah4332 6y agoWe really need to stop expecting so much from speech in technology. It simply isn't a great input method. It's loud, it lacks privacy, and for short commands it takes way too long. I think a lot of people are counting on speech to bring us into a sort of Star Trek future. The real game changer for input is along the lines of what the neural lace is supposed to be. Cognitive input. Silent, fast, efficient. In many cases once the technology is mature people won't even have to internally verbalize commands. Just look at a light and desire it to be dimmer.. it dims. "typing" at the speed of internalized though will also be amazing. Every time I hear someone (including myself) tripping over "OK Google" I cringe.
- Supermancho 6y ago> It simply isn't a great input method Loud is relative, privacy is an aimless indictment that's orthogonal, and for brevity? Speech is a fantastic tool for communication, which includes input and output. It's part of why most large animals, for which quick communication is imperative, use it. It's imprecise, which is the problem that machines are not good at dealing with. It's was a good direction, when we used to have machines that were initially trained with speech for better accuracy, but now passive listening of devices isn't even used for that! > The real game changer for input is along the lines of what the neural lace is supposed to be. Cognitive input. Silent, fast, efficient. Silent sure. The human mind is rather random, highly variable between individuals and ages. I would not call it fast or efficient. Then again, speech to text is contextual cognitive input. Without drugs or intentional damage (minor) to the brain, I don't expect neural implants to be very effective, even in the next 100 years.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoAnd then you have thought pop in to your head to send your manager an email calling them a fuckhead so your phone makes it happen.
- p1necone 6y agoI think trying to replace regular GUIs and mechanical inputs in every use case is naive, it seems pretty obvious to me that clicking on a button or pressing a keyboard shortcut is pretty much always going to be faster than uttering a voice command. But there's a huge swathe of use cases where it does make sense, and I think we should be focusing on those - situations when you can't use your hands. Voice assistant technology doesn't even need to be great for this, just good enough that you can look up unit conversions with your hands covered in bread dough, or navigate while driving or whatever.
- jcadam 6y agoI may date myself here, but the first thing that popped into my head when I read the title of this post was this scene from ST IV: https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE It's kinda funny watching someone without a background in CS repeatedly ask google/alexa/siri a question in different ways that you know isn't going to elicit any kind of useful response.
- justinlloyd 6y agoI generally loathe voice input on computers & phones. I have very specific use cases for the two assistants I've created. "Open the pod bay doors Hal" = open the garage door (but only because it is funny). "Start the dust extractor Hal" = start the workshop dust extractor, but I no longer use this since upgrading to remote start/power line detection on my dust extractor. "Hey producer, <various commands to control video production software and PTZ cameras>" = start recording/cut cameras/re read the prompt/extreme close-up on keyboard/pan the camera to me/etc for video production in a one-man multi-camera recording setup. Everything else, when it comes to NLP, chat bots and voice recognition is "too much trouble" and I find hitting a dedicated button or punching in to a few numbers on a physical keypad to be easier and more reliable than any voice interface.
- grawprog 6y agoPretty much the only thing i've ever used the google assistant for was to ask it for definitions of terms from urban dictionary, then giggle like a school child while google read them out to me. That was fun for about 10 minutes. It's been disabled ever since.
- aaron695 6y agoIt's the classic IT scam that is the entire industry. When people demo Speech Technology they have the computer doing general AI in response. Things that are impossible with text or any computer input or anything that can happen for decades. Reality is, no one wants Speech Technology, we want a computer that can order a pizza with the simple typed words, get me a pizza. Heck, you pull that off people would even do the way more annoying 'talking' to the computer to access that tech. What people really want is text to speech. But that's to hard to do the AI scam on.
- remir 6y agoI often use Siri when I'm driving to send text messages and it's OK. The speech recognition in Google Maps also works great. But beyond that, I don't really use these "digital assistant" because you can't teach them when they're wrong, so after 2-3 failed attempt at a request, you lose interest because you can't trust the system.
- swiley 6y agoBecause none of them are an improvement over a shell. Maybe if there were a better way to pronounce "open paren" and "make-vector" we could just yell scheme at the nearest computer. IMO you're never going to get anywhere trying to make shells speak natural language. Even if you crammed a person into the box there's just way too much you could ask to narrow it down without something formal. At the end of the day you'll have to have something that looks like sh or any other formal language.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI'm dictating this. Not going to make any corrections, so that you caan see what the state-of-the-art is right now, including bugging us (that supposed to be bugging this. Apparently it doesn't recognize that word it's the quality of being buggy).speech is my primary interface my computer due to health issues, and my God is it infuriating.it's never going to really take off until it just works. imagine if your keyboard had about a 2nd latency and every couple words got messed up in some way. Not only that, but those same words that got messed up are probably getting be messed up again when you try to go back and fix it with the same broken keyboard. you wouldn't say that typing is nearly solved, you'd say that typing absolutely sucks and keyboards just don't work. I firmly believe that speech is going to be the main interface-actually want to scratch that last sentence, but correcting it is can the pain with voice. I firmly believe that speech is going to be a game changer of an interface, especially for coding, eventually. But until it stops sucking, it's only can be used where where there is no other choice. (By the way, this is me, a native English speaker with a standard salmon Cisco accent-that's a standard San Francisco accent- dictating it on a many hundred dollar microphone into a many hundred dollar speech engine, speaking relatively slowly and enunciating the hell out of out of things.when I first started with that, it was even worse. and yet somehow a lot of people treat speech recognition as if it is in some way solved, or the error rate is better than human.or loader ship-that's supposedd to be what a load of ship-whatever you see what I mean) ----- (edit: After the fact, I decided to calculate the word error rate dictating thhis. About 7%. If you ignore the non-speech-related bugs, it's about 4%, which is supposedly "superhuman." take that as you will. my take is that "human level" is not the same as a human trying to work as fast as they can, and maybe not paying particularly close attention. And that 4% is ridiculously far from 0% in terms of usability)
- jrlnm 6y agoI think the issue with typing via voice are: 1) Speech accuracy 2) Correcting things by voice It's super unnatural to correct things by voice and until we re-imagine what it looks like if we HAD to type via voice, it's gonna be painful. (Speaking as someone who types via voice as well). Have used Dragon and now currently Talon
- stiray 6y agoImho, the issue with speech technology is that it is beeing developed by companies that wants to abuse your home (device,...). There is just no way I will let google device that listens my conversations let at my home (let me be faster - no, my phone doesnt listen, and yes I am sure, its maker wouldnt recognize it any more). Or amazon. Or facebook. Sure speech technology could be usefull but not from those companies. On the other side, there is just no usable way found by anyone else, how to monetize the technology (i.e. except for spying on people). I think that this is THE problem of speech recognition.
- svikashk 6y agoMore than anything, the problem with these assistants is it’s still socially awkward to talk to a computer. I can imagine people using it exponentially more when you no longer get weird looks when you say “Ok google” or whatever in a supermarket.
- dlkf 6y agoSomething the VR/AR/SR crowds don't always seem to understand: we have been manipulating tools with opposable thumbs longer than we been using language. A keyboard and mouse are not a shoddy stopgap for the utopian future in which we control things directly with our mind. They simply are how we control things with our mind.
- thenoblesunfish 6y agoIn fairness, I don't talk to people either.
- psysharp 6y agoI don’t know what speech tech will be good for, probably a lot of things, but typing I think will remain as the preferred mode of communication indefinitely. It is already the more sophisticated approach. Using speech is kind of trying to use a new kind of paint that only works on paper to also work on cave walls. Nevertheless we might discover something in the process.
- thrower123 6y agoI hate talking to people; I absolutely do not want to talk to machinery, unless I'm cussing it and beating on it with something heavy.