7 ms·

The problem isn't voice, it's natural language. Natural language is a fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey information to a computer. It can be useful for som

by qsort 4y ago

The problem isn't voice, it's natural language. Natural language is a fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey information to a computer. It can be useful for some specific tasks, automated Q/A, simple interfaces to databases, stuff where I can't be properly f_ed to remember the syntax or the shortcut like IDE commands. But the idea it can replace formal language is fundamentally and dangerously incorrect. I agree with Dijkstra's quip, we shouldn't regard formal language as a burden, but rather as a privilege.

darkerside 4y ago
The problem is both
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> we shouldn't regard formal language as a burden, but rather as a privilege What the hell? Is riding public transport or riding a bike either a burdain or a privilidge? Is Driving a car? I am trying to control shit in my home, it should be neither.
- duggan 4y ago
  Dijkstra's full essay[1] is a bit more illuminating, but essentially it's about how, for example, developing a system of symbols and formal language around mathematics has allowed "school children [to] learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve". 1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
  - em500 4y ago
    I think his argument even generalizes to literacy in general. Remember that reading and writing skills don't develop naturally (as opposed to spoken language). They require a large educational investment, and used to be reserved for the wealthy and the privileged.
4b11b4 4y ago
An example backing this is voice assistants that DO work, e.g. Talon voice. But these require defining a language, and then they are very accurate and powerful. I don't see why a voice assistant for the masses couldn't "train it's own users", for example suggesting the language it does expect. But even then, most times people are talking in noisy environments or talk to fast or don't have an understand of how the machine might work. Regardless, who cares. They ruin the audio environment of a home. They're good for setting timers while you're cooking, that's about it.
- Thlom 4y ago
  Only thing I use Siri for as well.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  They're also fantastic at playing soothing music while your hands are busy holding a crying baby.
- tsss 4y ago
  Car voice assistants do this, but they're still clunky and it takes them forever to list their options. Voice interfaces just like CLI suffer from extremely bad discoverability and presentation compared to GUIs and thus will always be limited to specialty applications. CLIs at least have a league of try-hards and hobby linux users to keep them alive.
albertzeyer 4y ago
On the other side, humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other. So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech recognition itself has gotten really good but then understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is natural language understanding, and that is often the problem.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > have been fine Citation needed, there's a lot of disagreements and misunderstandings (some have cost lives) that could've been avoided if we didn't have 10 different ways to say the same vague thing that can be interpreted in 20 ways. You think the military uses a phonetic alphabet and specifically structured communications for fun? Or the way planes talk to ATC for example. Where precision and unambiguity is crucial, natural language always gets ditched for something more formal.
  - groestl 4y ago
    Thanks for that. A lot of energy is currently sunk because of natural language, and I'd argue gains from employing software (instead of human processes) for various tasks is in part due to scaling up the results of many confusing discussions in natural language about what a specific process actually comprises.
    - b112 4y ago
      This is part of the reason Google search sucks more and more. Around when Android appeared, and the first voice searches began, Google suddenly started to alias everything. Search for 'Andy', 'Andrew' appears. Search for 'there', and 'they're' appears. This has been taken further, now silly aliases such as debian .. ubuntu exist, and as google happily drops words in your search, to find a match, this makes precision impossible. But, that's the only way to make voice search remotely work, so...
      - jefftk 4y ago
pjc50 4y ago
The problem is that it's not actually a conversation. To significantly improve it, you'd want to: - identify users by voice - ask them clarifying questions - remember the answers on a per-user basis - understand "no, that was the wrong answer" If you're going to provide a formal interface to the computer, you also have to provide teaching in that formal interface, which is far more of a burden to the user than the cost of the device. And we've completely moved away from that model (not necessarily a good thing, but that's what the market has chosen).
- michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  I think you're right. There are glimpses of this in the voice interfaces right now. For example, Alexa will distinguish between voices and preferentially take actions for me, saying "Play Music" plays Spotify, and for my kids, it plays Amazon music.
- enobrev 4y ago
  Calling it a burden is an assumption that ignores and belittles the end user. Sure, there are people who won't want to train their personal ai. But I imagine there are significantly more who would appreciate clarifying requests by a teachable assistant capable of interacting with the entire digital world on their behalf, efficiently and intelligently.
version_five 4y ago
Right - natural language works for people because we have minds that are communicating. A virtual assistant has a list of things it can do, and uses language as an interface to them. So the language just becomes obfuscation instead of allowing clarification. I've said before, I would prefer a voice assistant that optimized for traversing its menu system, in response to unambiguous noises (could be high and low pitch hums or whatever) that lets me bypass the guessing game and use the menu it's hiding
- klibertp 4y ago
  Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI ? Here you traverse the AST, but the idea is similar, I think.
RupertEisenhart 4y ago
Are you trying to say, Alexa should be funding the synthetic language nerds over at Lojban[0] or the Universal Networking Language[1]??? That would be a fun universe. [0] https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-US https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-US [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language
bombcar 4y ago
I'd be perfectly happy with a list of Siri commands that I would have to learn to be able to do things. I don't care if I ended up sounding like: Hey Siri Turn lights on 50 percent For one hour Dim over that time Play music. I can learn what I need to do; JUST LET ME KNOW THE MAGIC WORDS!
- ics 4y ago
  Not to take away from your point (I'd like the magic list too) but to some degree, this can be worked around using Shortcuts. If you use inputs, Siri will prompt for them which is a bit slow but you could even use a dictate text and parse yourself if desired.
- LooseMarmoset 4y ago
  It's like playing Zork all over again.
  - toxik 4y ago
    But with the added complexity that sometimes the speech-to-text will just crap out completely.
    - LooseMarmoset 4y ago
      Alexa, turn on lights ...I don't know how to do that Alexa, turn lights on ...What do I turn the lights with? Alexa, activate lights ...I don't know what you mean ...It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. ALEXA TURN ON THE DAMN LIGHTS ...I don't know the word "lights" ...Oh no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a grue! ** You have died **
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Siri, turn on bathroom lights. Downstairs or upstairs bathroom? Downstairs. Sorry, I didn’t understand. Downstairs it upstairs bathroom? Downstairs bathroom. Sorry, I didn’t understand. Downstairs it upstairs bathroom? Cancel. Ok. Cancelling. Siri turn on downstairs bathroom lights. (Turns off all lights)
foobarian 4y ago
The problem is that it doesn't make money. Otherwise, it works great :-) We love the hands-off usage mode because we cook a lot, so adding things to shopping lists or looking stuff up doesn't require cleaning hands in the middle of prep. Also the speakers are pretty darn good for the size and work well for music. Doing complicated things is right out though. But the simple stuff works fine.
Ajedi32 4y ago
I'm just waiting for someone to finally release a voice assistant built around an actual language model, like GPT-3 or LaMDA. It would be more error prone in a lot of ways, which is probably why nobody's done it yet, but it would also be a _lot_ more powerful, and fulfill the vision of conversational AI in a way the current rules-based assistants do not. I think if powerful language models were easily accessible to normal people (in an inexpensive and completely unrestricted fashion, like with Stable Diffusion) we'd already see this happening in the open source world. Companies are going to be a lot more hesitant to try it though until they have a way to 100% prevent the models from making mistakes that could reflect poorly on the company, which is going to take _way_ longer to achieve.
gernb 4y ago
Natural language conveys information to other people just fine. So the problem isn't that "Natural language is a fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey information to a computer". The problem is getting the computer to understand natural language to the same level as a human.

by qsort 4y ago

darkerside 4y ago

The problem is both

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> we shouldn't regard formal language as a burden, but rather as a privilege What the hell? Is riding public transport or riding a bike either a burdain or a privilidge? Is Driving a car? I am trying to control shit in my home, it should be neither.

duggan 4y ago
Dijkstra's full essay[1] is a bit more illuminating, but essentially it's about how, for example, developing a system of symbols and formal language around mathematics has allowed "school children [to] learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve". 1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
- em500 4y ago
  I think his argument even generalizes to literacy in general. Remember that reading and writing skills don't develop naturally (as opposed to spoken language). They require a large educational investment, and used to be reserved for the wealthy and the privileged.

4b11b4 4y ago

An example backing this is voice assistants that DO work, e.g. Talon voice. But these require defining a language, and then they are very accurate and powerful. I don't see why a voice assistant for the masses couldn't "train it's own users", for example suggesting the language it does expect. But even then, most times people are talking in noisy environments or talk to fast or don't have an understand of how the machine might work. Regardless, who cares. They ruin the audio environment of a home. They're good for setting timers while you're cooking, that's about it.

Thlom 4y ago
Only thing I use Siri for as well.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
They're also fantastic at playing soothing music while your hands are busy holding a crying baby.
tsss 4y ago
Car voice assistants do this, but they're still clunky and it takes them forever to list their options. Voice interfaces just like CLI suffer from extremely bad discoverability and presentation compared to GUIs and thus will always be limited to specialty applications. CLIs at least have a league of try-hards and hobby linux users to keep them alive.

albertzeyer 4y ago

On the other side, humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other. So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech recognition itself has gotten really good but then understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is natural language understanding, and that is often the problem.

moffkalast 4y ago
> have been fine Citation needed, there's a lot of disagreements and misunderstandings (some have cost lives) that could've been avoided if we didn't have 10 different ways to say the same vague thing that can be interpreted in 20 ways. You think the military uses a phonetic alphabet and specifically structured communications for fun? Or the way planes talk to ATC for example. Where precision and unambiguity is crucial, natural language always gets ditched for something more formal.
- groestl 4y ago
  Thanks for that. A lot of energy is currently sunk because of natural language, and I'd argue gains from employing software (instead of human processes) for various tasks is in part due to scaling up the results of many confusing discussions in natural language about what a specific process actually comprises.
  - b112 4y ago
    This is part of the reason Google search sucks more and more. Around when Android appeared, and the first voice searches began, Google suddenly started to alias everything. Search for 'Andy', 'Andrew' appears. Search for 'there', and 'they're' appears. This has been taken further, now silly aliases such as debian .. ubuntu exist, and as google happily drops words in your search, to find a match, this makes precision impossible. But, that's the only way to make voice search remotely work, so...
    - jefftk 4y ago

pjc50 4y ago

The problem is that it's not actually a conversation. To significantly improve it, you'd want to: - identify users by voice - ask them clarifying questions - remember the answers on a per-user basis - understand "no, that was the wrong answer" If you're going to provide a formal interface to the computer, you also have to provide teaching in that formal interface, which is far more of a burden to the user than the cost of the device. And we've completely moved away from that model (not necessarily a good thing, but that's what the market has chosen).

michaelbuckbee 4y ago
I think you're right. There are glimpses of this in the voice interfaces right now. For example, Alexa will distinguish between voices and preferentially take actions for me, saying "Play Music" plays Spotify, and for my kids, it plays Amazon music.
enobrev 4y ago
Calling it a burden is an assumption that ignores and belittles the end user. Sure, there are people who won't want to train their personal ai. But I imagine there are significantly more who would appreciate clarifying requests by a teachable assistant capable of interacting with the entire digital world on their behalf, efficiently and intelligently.

version_five 4y ago

Right - natural language works for people because we have minds that are communicating. A virtual assistant has a list of things it can do, and uses language as an interface to them. So the language just becomes obfuscation instead of allowing clarification. I've said before, I would prefer a voice assistant that optimized for traversing its menu system, in response to unambiguous noises (could be high and low pitch hums or whatever) that lets me bypass the guessing game and use the menu it's hiding

klibertp 4y ago
Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI ? Here you traverse the AST, but the idea is similar, I think.

RupertEisenhart 4y ago

Are you trying to say, Alexa should be funding the synthetic language nerds over at Lojban[0] or the Universal Networking Language[1]??? That would be a fun universe. [0] https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-US https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-US [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language

bombcar 4y ago

I'd be perfectly happy with a list of Siri commands that I would have to learn to be able to do things. I don't care if I ended up sounding like: Hey Siri Turn lights on 50 percent For one hour Dim over that time Play music. I can learn what I need to do; JUST LET ME KNOW THE MAGIC WORDS!

ics 4y ago
Not to take away from your point (I'd like the magic list too) but to some degree, this can be worked around using Shortcuts. If you use inputs, Siri will prompt for them which is a bit slow but you could even use a dictate text and parse yourself if desired.
LooseMarmoset 4y ago
It's like playing Zork all over again.
- toxik 4y ago
  But with the added complexity that sometimes the speech-to-text will just crap out completely.
  - LooseMarmoset 4y ago
    Alexa, turn on lights ...I don't know how to do that Alexa, turn lights on ...What do I turn the lights with? Alexa, activate lights ...I don't know what you mean ...It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. ALEXA TURN ON THE DAMN LIGHTS ...I don't know the word "lights" ...Oh no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a grue! ** You have died **
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Siri, turn on bathroom lights. Downstairs or upstairs bathroom? Downstairs. Sorry, I didn’t understand. Downstairs it upstairs bathroom? Downstairs bathroom. Sorry, I didn’t understand. Downstairs it upstairs bathroom? Cancel. Ok. Cancelling. Siri turn on downstairs bathroom lights. (Turns off all lights)

foobarian 4y ago

The problem is that it doesn't make money. Otherwise, it works great :-) We love the hands-off usage mode because we cook a lot, so adding things to shopping lists or looking stuff up doesn't require cleaning hands in the middle of prep. Also the speakers are pretty darn good for the size and work well for music. Doing complicated things is right out though. But the simple stuff works fine.

Ajedi32 4y ago

I'm just waiting for someone to finally release a voice assistant built around an actual language model, like GPT-3 or LaMDA. It would be more error prone in a lot of ways, which is probably why nobody's done it yet, but it would also be a _lot_ more powerful, and fulfill the vision of conversational AI in a way the current rules-based assistants do not. I think if powerful language models were easily accessible to normal people (in an inexpensive and completely unrestricted fashion, like with Stable Diffusion) we'd already see this happening in the open source world. Companies are going to be a lot more hesitant to try it though until they have a way to 100% prevent the models from making mistakes that could reflect poorly on the company, which is going to take _way_ longer to achieve.

gernb 4y ago

Natural language conveys information to other people just fine. So the problem isn't that "Natural language is a fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey information to a computer". The problem is getting the computer to understand natural language to the same level as a human.