22 ms·

Natural language is the lazy user interface

311 points by azhenley 4y ago

osigurdson 4y ago
It kind of makes sense. People that can do so, send emails to others to do things instead of clicking through menus.
hallqv 4y ago
Very short-sighted post, future chat interfaces will of course guide the user in the right direction by asking the right questions, like a very skilled personal assistant. Text interfaces will make most guis obsolete, every power cumputer knows cli >> gui.
diogopublio 4y ago
here is a good example of a rudimentar use: multion.ai
- ed 4y ago
  Cool! Looks like an improved version of Natbot https://github.com/nat/natbot https://github.com/nat/natbot
  - diogopublio 4y ago
    great to see an open source version, tks!
jermaustin1 4y ago
I can't help but agree fully. Its worse on telephones where they might be doing NLP, but they cannot understand and parse accents and dialects. I remember my late grandmother trying to call AT&T a couple of years ago (just before COVID), and the robot would ask: "What can I help you with?" and then could not understand how she pronounced "pay my bill" because she said "PAY mah BEEEEEL". But just hitting 0 did nothing, so after 5 minutes of her repeating "PAY mah BEEEEL" over and over, I took the phone from her and did it. From then on she would have to have other people pay her bill over the phone. Doing this to a much more complex user interface and providing me no clue what I'm supposed to ask for something I have no way of knowing that I don't know it is a dystopian future I'm glad my grandmother won't have to endure.
- hacker_9 4y ago
  It's poor thinking on them to only provide a talking interface. I don't think I've encountered that personally, there is always a way to use the keypad - which I will always use anyway, even though they understand my voice, it's just x10 faster. And if you've made the call before you can type on the keypad before the robot on the other side is done talking.
  - tiagod 4y ago
    There's plenty of services in Portugal that only have the damned robots. They're also adding the most infuriating chatbots that they pretty much force you to go through before getting to a human. Can't wait for the day this is all banned.
    - Dudeman112 4y ago
      Whenever this is discussed, it always makes me wonder... Why? Just why? SURELY just adding an option to use the damn textual "pick 1 for Blah, 2 for bleh..." would take no effort at all?
      - monkpit 4y ago
        You also have to consider - does the company you are calling BENEFIT from you hanging up in anger/frustration? Many times the answer is yes.
        Dudeman112 4y ago
        Most of the time the answer long term is "no" because as long as it's not a monopoly people will go to their competitors that aren't utter shite at what they do
        monkpit 4y ago
        I think the number of people who would actually do this is smaller than you think.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
The reason terminal interfaces are often criticized is because they lack discoverability, leaving the user at a complete loss or at least hiding the full array of functions the program offers. The reason many amateur GUI programs (GIMP) are criticized is because they lack discoverability, leaving the user at a complete loss or at least hiding the full array of functions the program offers. The reason many programs based on NLMs will be criticized is because...
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Right: it turns out that when someone wants to offer someone else a plethora of options in one fell swoop, graphics are much more efficient than language because it takes way less time to consume. Even if commands like "help" or "what can I ask you about" end up providing equivalent discovery, consuming that delivery (whether reading text or listening to spoken word) takes many times longer. Users of screen readers mitigate this by cranking up the speed to levels that typical users would severely struggle to understand: it takes a lot of practice to get efficient with using language in this way efficiently. And chat bots often add artificial delay in an attempt to humanize the experience -- making this even worse!
  - GrinningFool 4y ago
    > graphics are much more efficient than language Graphics are just another language. When looked at across desktop applications, mobile applications, operating systems, and web sites it's a language that's much less consistent than any written language.
- zzo38computer 4y ago
  > The reason terminal interfaces are often criticized is because they lack discoverability, That is why documentation is needed to be included with the program. Any software will be difficult to understand if you do not include documentation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
It could be good, if the interface actually understood more sentences. Usually it’s “tell me in a few words what you want,” which I do, it answers “I’m not sure what you want,” I try again, it gives up and reads off a list of things to say, none of which are what I want, then I start yelling “agent,” “operator,” and various curse words. Or “sales” on the theory that they’re most likely to talk to someone who they think will give them money.
- chinabot 4y ago
  It can only be good when the computer understands EVERY sentence, every accent, every nuance and understands context and threads.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    When I turn on closed captioning on Zoom, I get a very good transcript of what’s being said in real time. It even backtracks and corrects, after it’s had half a second to reconsider the input.
ccn0p 4y ago
related -- i was just looking at serenade.io and thinking to myself that aside from accessibility purposes, what developer wants to learn a new voice abstraction on top of their programming language abstraction.
ctoth 4y ago
Can't each and every one of these criticisms be also leveled at CLIs? Don't we like CLIs? I notice I am confused. > The least it could do is intelligently give me a starting point for typing in a prompt. The tyranny of the blank textbox is real. Seems LLMs would be way better at this sort of thing -- What can I do here, instead of "do I type help? man? apropos?"
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Can't each and every one of these criticisms be also leveled at CLIs? Don't we like CLIs? I notice I am confused. It is not about text. In CLIs you have a set of commands. In those interfaces you have some hidden commands which you must trigger with keywords.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Node and npm are notorious for having command line flags almost none of which are listed in the help, and less than half of which are documented on the website. I'm running node and npm flags in production deployment pipelines right now that I found on Stack Overflow or the bug database and exist nowhere on the official websites. And if you look at the historic documentation, the current situation is a factor of 3 improvement over even Node 10 or 12 era, which is far better than the node < 1.0 period What you say is true of good CLIs, not tire fires like Node.js. So you're both right depending on context.
    - b5n 4y ago
      I'm not sure how much time you spent on SO, but this only took me a couple of minutes of digging and I don't work with node. git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node.git grep -E -A 1 -R "Add(Option|Alias)" node/src/node_options.cc There may be options I've missed because I haven't dedicated more than a couple minutes to it, but I think this demonstrates a straightforward approach to diving a little deeper when necessary and should be easy to adjust/build upon depending on your case. Your gripe regarding documentation is legitimate, but if you're an engineer responsible for deployments who needs to go past typical usage consulting the source should be in your bag of tricks. Having a deeper understanding of the tools you use and rely on isn't going to hurt you or your career. https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Undocumented.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Undocumen...
pelorat 4y ago
> "people are bad at words" People are worse at command line interfaces and even clicking on buttons.
vonnik 4y ago
This is a limiting perspective inherently pessimistic about LLMs. The best NLP interfaces will be asking questions to the users, in order to figure out what their real problem is. This is similar to what teachers and therapists do. It is not a lazy interface, but a natural one. The chatbot will step the user through a decision tree in situations where the user doesn't know how to ask questions or frame the problem.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  A decision tree. Also known as a phone tree, which has been around for nigh-on 40 years now. You don't need AI for that.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    Decision trees are inherently limited on the different inputs it can take from the end user (yes/no etc.). The hope here, as I understand it, is to take free-form input from the user and map it back to one of the branches of the decision trees.
    - vonnik 4y ago
      It depends on how you define decision tree. We all gather information in order to recognize complex patterns and make decisions. Some of those decision flows are extremely deep, with complex inputs to determine the ultimate decision. Skilled teachers and therapists develop pattern recognition skills that allow them to tailor a response to the state of their interlocutor. That process is analogous to a decision tree, but feel free to apply another word to it if you like. Whatever we call it, I think chatbots will be able to do that, and I think that will be a good thing. Everybody's thinking about chatbots as a black box that answers our questions. That's not the real value. The real value is to give those bots much large multi-modal prompts about whatever problem we seek to solve, and let the LLM ask us the questions to ferret out features that are not superficially visible, so that it can give us better guidance.
- azhenley 4y ago
haswell 4y ago
If my years as a product manager taught me anything, it’s that users absolutely do not know what they want in the moment. With enough time exploring the problem space, it becomes easier to tease out the real needs of the user. But this doesn’t happen overnight. Asking a user to interact with one of these chat interfaces is like asking them what they want - every time they use the software. This cognitive load would make me personally seek alternative tools.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Asking a user to interact with one of these chat interfaces is like asking them what they want - every time they use the software. The ribbon is the same. Good luck finding something in it. But this seems to be the future.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    The ribbon (particularly in Microsoft Office) solves the problem that users don't know what they want, because it lays out all the options in front of them in a clearly organized hierarchy, with hover previews and textual labels for every command except for extremely well-known commands (like Bold/Italic). This is very different from chat interfaces, which are opaque black boxes and in order to get anything out of them users have to express their wish in words, with nothing to start from.
    - civilized 4y ago
      I'll just add here that it doesn't have to be only one or the other. The ribbon might be good for discovering features, but it's inefficient for using those features once discovered. If the user already knows what the thing they want is called, the fastest way to find it is a search bar that searches the labyrinth of menus and ribbons when you type into it. Google and Mac apps usually have this.
      - Too 4y ago
        Press Alt. It will highlight the key-binding to press to reach any item on the ribbon.
jasonjmcghee 4y ago
I agree that a singular text interface is far from an ideal ux, I do firmly believe providing smarter, more flexible command palettes will be a huge value-add to many user interfaces. Should you be able to interact manually - sure! But complex user interfaces tend to struggle with information architecture throughout their lifetime. Many of the obstacles could be well-mitigated by providing a declarative user experience - the easiest example is Jetbrains "Actions" interface. I wrote about my perspective in longer form a handful of months ago: https://productiveadventures.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-declarative-ux https://productiveadventures.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-decl...
seydor 4y ago
LLMs can also talk, not just listen
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  LLMs inherently do not know what questions to ask. Other algorithms know, but not them.
  - seydor 4y ago
    "Ask me 10 random questions"
ddmma 4y ago
Adding machines into the way humans interact not only will make the experience more natural and enjoyable but definitely understand the environment both sides. I would celebrate the historic advancement of the technology instead of looking for flaws necessarily.
chinchilla2020 4y ago
The worst online MUD I ever played had a tutorial puzzle that was something like this. "Now, use the mechanisms on the catapult to launch the catapult" There was no other explanation of what your options were. I tried: 'pull the lever' 'release the spring' 'fire the catapult' 'pull back the lever' 'use the lever' It finally turned out to be something like "release the lever". The problem with chat is that you are attaching it to a rigid user interface that has a tiny subset of options compared to the breadth of human language. The user has to probe the awful chatbot for these options.
rednerrus 4y ago
I've had GPT-3 as a replacement to Siri on my Apple Watch for the last month or so and it's awesome.
- monkpit 4y ago
  How?
  - rednerrus 4y ago
    https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/62624b2613b245698d81ebd9ac920c12 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/62624b2613b245698d81ebd9ac9...
janalsncm 4y ago
I still think voice should be the goal. It has been the universal API for thousands of years. All of us are probably “good with computers” by virtue of the fact that we figured out how to sign up but there are millions who aren’t. This isn’t an excuse to replace UIs or humans with horrible phone trees. I won’t defend the obvious race to the bottom. Hopefully better voice interfaces are here soon.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  given the extent to which audio phone calls have been replaced by text I'm always super sceptical of voice as the primary interface. It has so many disadvantages. No simple to see history, loud (by definition) in any non-private space, not composable, not easily copyable, very slow discovery, and so on. Voice is strictly serial. Tactile or visual interfaces you can just look at and move around in and immediately have a layout of the thing. Regardless of how smart the voice control is those issues are pretty intrinstic. There's also no 'halting state' to voice. That you can switch between different visual interfaces without losing your state is pretty necessary today. But you can't really stop or multitask audio controls sensibly.
  - gbear605 4y ago
    Voice also simply doesn’t work for people with auditory issues (which includes many elderly people)! They theoretically could use video with a sign language, but there’s no way that that will be prioritized, especially with the “get 80% done and ignore the rest of the use cases” attitude that people have. Text to speech is the solution that they wind up using, but then what’s even the point? Thank god for the ADA at least.
soorya3 4y ago
Chatbot may be lazy user interface for some tasks but it is very good at assistive task like writing, coding, review etc. It is a language model and a foundation for other software products. Over time integrating with LLM into existing user interfaces will solve the problem you mentioned.
sigmonsays 4y ago
I wonder if there is something in rust that can be done to improve the LLM
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  You missed opportunity of LL[V]M
intrasight 4y ago
Natural language is at least 100,000 years old. It's not lazy - it's just natural.
pottspotts 4y ago
I've largely used GPT as a replacement for Google, and I find it to be a lot smarter and faster. The criticisms the author level at it don't seem based on having used it for anything substantial. It is an excellent tool and a major step, and it will only get better and easier to use, it seems.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Button is the goat user interface. Sound engineer devices, plane consoles, etc. I have the same thought since 2010, IIRC it was voice commands hype back then. I think they should focus on interfaceless learning model .. but I don't know what pure semantic they suppose to eat (learn) .. maybe TBs of XML lol.
anotheryou 4y ago
It's versatility that's king here. Sure a knob for "snow flake size" is nice, but most often I don't work on snowflakes and their sizes. But if I do in the near future I'm sure I can just say: "I used snowflake size in a lot of my prompts, can you just make it a knob for me?"
mk_stjames 4y ago
This parallels a longstanding critique I have of many modern user interfaces compared to slightly older software in the field of what I would consider 'power user' engineering tools; programs like FE tools, CAD & other CAE, etc. These are the kind of programs that had a stride starting in the late 90's to 2007-ish where they just slammed tons of toolbars around the edges of the screen, sometimes nesting functions or contexting workbenches but ultimately allowing the user to have everything exposed to them at once if needed. As screen real estate grew with higher res and larger monitors, the icons got smaller which was even better for the power user- you could fit even more on the screen if you wanted! But starting around 2008-2009 I noticed a trend, and it continues to this day- the power user oriented layouts started being replaced with more 'friendly', larger icon, children's game looking UI. Intuitive graphical icons were replaced with stylish, monotone shit that looks like a graphic design student's dream, but conveyed less instant information. I blame some of this shift on the move in Office to the Ribbon system and developers trying to imitate that, but some software I've seen takes that and does it much worse. I want all my functions laid out and accessible. Like this blog post mentions, sometimes I don't know what I am wanting to do until I see it. I want to be able to explore the entire space before I know what it all does, maybe. Using natural language can be very powerful if it augments these systems, but for many tools it isn't a replacement. Often I think new software is designed around looking impressive and fast to upper level management at the expense of the usability of the power users who ultimately are the users that get things done.
- Def_Os 4y ago
  Instead of the Ribbon, don't you think it was rise of tablets that influenced these design changes?
- klabb3 4y ago
  > Intuitive graphical icons were replaced with stylish, monotone shit that looks like a graphic design student's dream, but conveyed less instant information. Design is the art of signal-to-noise ratio, or in simpler terms, balance and harmony. If you over-use any modality, lines, text, color, nesting, you increase the noise level. If you underutilize a modality (for instance your whole UI is monochrome), you reduce your signal bandwidth. Every trend gets mindless followers, who throw the baby out with the bath water without even realizing it. But trends also bring a grain of gold to the table. For instance, monotone icons allow many more elements in the same screen real estate than text, and by not using color you can have a larger color budget for other elements, which you can use elsewhere to convey progress, status, or anything else important. A good use of monotone icons are text formatting (bold, justify, etc) and display options (column view, tree view, etc), or toolbars (like in photoshop or 3D tools). Many apps from the 2010 era overused colored icons, and I’m glad those went away. Some FOSS apps still suffer from that.
kris_wayton 4y ago
I agree it's not for everything, but it seems like better NLP/NLG could improve things like Alexa a lot. Alexa is fine for setting timers, turning off lights, etc. But currently when I ask it anything that Google Search or ChatGPT handles well, Alexa falls down and tells me the wrong info.
RyanShook 4y ago
Chat tools that help power users access features or settings inside of an app are where I think the immediate value is. App interfaces are super simple which reduces cognitive load on the user but hides many needed features. I have to hunt around so many app and website pages to find the setting I need and I think this is an area good chat interfaces can excel.
- Xelynega 4y ago
  How is it that CAD programs manage to be usable to power users with graphical interfaces and keybind then? If the problem is that UI has been dumbed down to the point of being unusable for the sake of design, then I don't think adding another layer on top is the solution.
sam_lowry_ 4y ago
Robert Sheckley said it way better in Ask a Foolish Question [1]: "In order to ask a question you must already know most of the answer." [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33854/pg33854-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33854/pg33854-images.ht...
freedude 4y ago
All user interfaces should be as challenging as Perl RegEx. Here is a great idea; for the answer to be valid make it required to be in the form of a Perl RegEx. That will get rid of the lazy people.
- hulitu 4y ago
  I think you never used a Microsoft GUI. PERL RegEx is deterministic.
cwalv 4y ago
Spot on. Now word can augment it's UI, maybe automatically recognizing when I'm writing a letter and offering to help with that specific task.
- hulitu 4y ago
  "Looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help with that ?" The good old days, when the first thing you do after installing Office was disabling Office Assistant.
davidkunz 4y ago
Chat interfaces are great if 1) you know what you want 2) the alternative would require manual navigation to multiple UIs and/or many interactions
corytheboyd 4y ago
Best of both worlds is a searchable action menu. Search matches action names as well as description, bonus points if it shows related actions as well. Actions have help documents if necessary. Solves the discovery problem, is still deterministic and sensible, doesn't need anything more fancy than full text search. Add ML if you have to, but for nothing more than a "suggested" list of actions, NOT as a replacement for deterministic search.
LASR 4y ago
100% Agree. When it comes to SeriousBusiness™, chat bots don't have sufficient constraints to extract specific input from free-form text. Applications are ultimately delivering value in a specific set of use-cases. Only some of those use-cases can be easily retrofitted with a chat-first interface. Consider something like Photoshop or Figma. There are so many ways you can issue commands that don't make sense. Eg: "Change the font-size on this color palette." Any sophisticated app will have these kinds of constraints. The user interface is not there only to accept input from the user. It also implicitly teaches the user some of the constraints in their apps. Without that, you're shifting the burden of understanding and maintaining the constraints to the user. And you're left with a (much smarter version) of "Hey Siri, do xyz...". This is a common ideation trap I see with PMs at the moment. The underlying problem again is that the human doesn't understand the limits of what their apps can do for them. As a second order, even if they did, humans can be bad at describing what they want to do.
dathinab 4y ago
lazy sure, but it's also the least precise by far tbh. the hardest part of many software projects is figuring out what really is needed I have seen startups with good tech and people fail because they slightly misjudged what their customers want and noticed way to late. A common cost driving factor when hiring a company to do a software project for you is that the requirements you legally agree one are not quite what you need so you have to pay for follow up changes. (This is also AFIK sometimes abused, initially underbidding the competition then "accidentally" creating a product which fits the requirements but not the actual needs and then selling overpriced follow up changes to an end code much higher then the competition would have been.)
philip1209 4y ago
Google's natural language interface seems to be popular.
phs 4y ago
Would databases have been better to work with if SQL didn't ape natural language? Would Excel, if it _did_ choose to embrace a "natural" macro syntax? Remember when CGI movies were all stuck in the uncanny valley? Turns out language has a valley too.
aogaili 4y ago
That textbook saves many clicks and Google searchers, questions and running around. It is not lazy; it is just a more effective tool, and humanity is all about progressive tech. So it is not being lazy; it is being..human.
colonwqbang 4y ago
This is really hitting the nail on the head. In the olden days there were prototypes like SHRDLU [1] which could be asked to do simple computing tasks. Is there something like that for GPT, a language model wired into a computing system that solves a concrete task? For instance, a simple image editing application with which the user can interact using natural language. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
ThomPete 4y ago
I call it lateral programming.
neilv 4y ago
I remember when Google started (I think it was still at Stanford then), and some professor was looking at my screen and remarking, irritated, about how it was just a text entry field with no indication of how people were supposed to use it. I figured he was probably thinking HCI "affordances", but I disagreed in this case. People were already typing search terms successfully, for indexers and even in Yahoo's directory. And Google's IR ranking model was noticeably much smarter than the existing Web ones, so I figured they'd also become smarter about interpreting whatever people typed (they'd get all the query data, and they could know what hits people clicked on for each).
superqd 4y ago
And yet it garnered millions of users within days. It has inspired people who don't do computers to feel like they can actually get amazing things done with computers. The pace of creative use cases discovered by non-tech types, with such a lazy interface, is nearly impossible to keep up with. It has democratized what is possible with technology, when that technology was programmable with natural language, i.e., by just asking questions, or asking it to do things, in every day language. It meant people who didn't know how to build software could get software to do their bidding regardless.
rajnathani 4y ago
Instead of natural language querying, having a “search for commands” shortcut which Google Docs has, but with using semantic search with GPT/LLM embeddings would be great! GPT3.5 (ChatGPT) seems easily resilient to typos too (eg: [0]). Also for latency, instead of a GPT-3/3.5 or other API based interactions, having a smaller openly available model to embed directly offline into the UI app frontend, like GPT2, BERT, etc. would make the most sense here. I’m sure Algolia or other startups might already be providing such a search system. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zew9ed/chatgpt_understanding_typos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zew9ed/chatgpt_und...
- simplyluke 4y ago
  This will be a use case - but I’d be deeply curious to understand the % of users who use that search for commands feature. I’d fully expect it’s less than 1%.
louison11 4y ago
It’s too binary of a perspective. NLP won’t replace graphical interfaces overall, but it will complement them. In cases where the user is wondering… maybe not so good. In cases where the user knows exactly what they want, or has a specific problem: excellent. And those cases are more frequent that some may realize. Banking, insurance, data management tools, messaging, question answering, recipe website, whatever you name it.
ninesnines 4y ago
I’ve been using ChatGPT with my research coding lately - but I think I’m very lucky to be at the point in my career where I can now debug things and think about the code that’s being presented to me with chat gpt, and let me tell you, I find a ton of errors in almost everything it presents me. But I have been exposed to so many more ways of organizing my code and solving problems that it has made me such a better coder. I feel that chat gpt for coding is perfect for people at my level; able to know enough to debug and write tests for everything, and know what the output should be, and yet not good enough at coding because they were home grown coders and haven’t been exposed to so many new ways of organizing and changing data.
ingenieroariel 4y ago
I have tried to teach everyone in my family to use Google with special keywords instead of natural language, for maybe 15 years. Much like how people who learned using books or articles diss on the people that learn using Youtube tutorials, LLMs via chat prompts and the iterative process may be better for the 90% of non pro users / developers out there even if we don't get it.
profstasiak 4y ago
i mean I hate chatbots, but it seems all the old people I know want me to be a "chatbot" for them. They tell me in natural language what they want, I talk with them and then fix their tech problems for them.

311 points by azhenley 4y ago

It kind of makes sense. People that can do so, send emails to others to do things instead of clicking through menus.

Very short-sighted post, future chat interfaces will of course guide the user in the right direction by asking the right questions, like a very skilled personal assistant. Text interfaces will make most guis obsolete, every power cumputer knows cli >> gui.

diogopublio 4y ago

here is a good example of a rudimentar use: multion.ai

ed 4y ago
Cool! Looks like an improved version of Natbot https://github.com/nat/natbot https://github.com/nat/natbot
- diogopublio 4y ago
  great to see an open source version, tks!

jermaustin1 4y ago

I can't help but agree fully. Its worse on telephones where they might be doing NLP, but they cannot understand and parse accents and dialects. I remember my late grandmother trying to call AT&T a couple of years ago (just before COVID), and the robot would ask: "What can I help you with?" and then could not understand how she pronounced "pay my bill" because she said "PAY mah BEEEEEL". But just hitting 0 did nothing, so after 5 minutes of her repeating "PAY mah BEEEEL" over and over, I took the phone from her and did it. From then on she would have to have other people pay her bill over the phone. Doing this to a much more complex user interface and providing me no clue what I'm supposed to ask for something I have no way of knowing that I don't know it is a dystopian future I'm glad my grandmother won't have to endure.

hacker_9 4y ago
It's poor thinking on them to only provide a talking interface. I don't think I've encountered that personally, there is always a way to use the keypad - which I will always use anyway, even though they understand my voice, it's just x10 faster. And if you've made the call before you can type on the keypad before the robot on the other side is done talking.
- tiagod 4y ago
  There's plenty of services in Portugal that only have the damned robots. They're also adding the most infuriating chatbots that they pretty much force you to go through before getting to a human. Can't wait for the day this is all banned.
  - Dudeman112 4y ago
    Whenever this is discussed, it always makes me wonder... Why? Just why? SURELY just adding an option to use the damn textual "pick 1 for Blah, 2 for bleh..." would take no effort at all?
    - monkpit 4y ago
      You also have to consider - does the company you are calling BENEFIT from you hanging up in anger/frustration? Many times the answer is yes.
      - Dudeman112 4y ago
        Most of the time the answer long term is "no" because as long as it's not a monopoly people will go to their competitors that aren't utter shite at what they do
        monkpit 4y ago
        I think the number of people who would actually do this is smaller than you think.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

The reason terminal interfaces are often criticized is because they lack discoverability, leaving the user at a complete loss or at least hiding the full array of functions the program offers. The reason many amateur GUI programs (GIMP) are criticized is because they lack discoverability, leaving the user at a complete loss or at least hiding the full array of functions the program offers. The reason many programs based on NLMs will be criticized is because...

hunter2_ 4y ago
Right: it turns out that when someone wants to offer someone else a plethora of options in one fell swoop, graphics are much more efficient than language because it takes way less time to consume. Even if commands like "help" or "what can I ask you about" end up providing equivalent discovery, consuming that delivery (whether reading text or listening to spoken word) takes many times longer. Users of screen readers mitigate this by cranking up the speed to levels that typical users would severely struggle to understand: it takes a lot of practice to get efficient with using language in this way efficiently. And chat bots often add artificial delay in an attempt to humanize the experience -- making this even worse!
- GrinningFool 4y ago
  > graphics are much more efficient than language Graphics are just another language. When looked at across desktop applications, mobile applications, operating systems, and web sites it's a language that's much less consistent than any written language.
zzo38computer 4y ago
> The reason terminal interfaces are often criticized is because they lack discoverability, That is why documentation is needed to be included with the program. Any software will be difficult to understand if you do not include documentation.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago

It could be good, if the interface actually understood more sentences. Usually it’s “tell me in a few words what you want,” which I do, it answers “I’m not sure what you want,” I try again, it gives up and reads off a list of things to say, none of which are what I want, then I start yelling “agent,” “operator,” and various curse words. Or “sales” on the theory that they’re most likely to talk to someone who they think will give them money.

chinabot 4y ago
It can only be good when the computer understands EVERY sentence, every accent, every nuance and understands context and threads.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  When I turn on closed captioning on Zoom, I get a very good transcript of what’s being said in real time. It even backtracks and corrects, after it’s had half a second to reconsider the input.

ccn0p 4y ago

related -- i was just looking at serenade.io and thinking to myself that aside from accessibility purposes, what developer wants to learn a new voice abstraction on top of their programming language abstraction.

ctoth 4y ago

Can't each and every one of these criticisms be also leveled at CLIs? Don't we like CLIs? I notice I am confused. > The least it could do is intelligently give me a starting point for typing in a prompt. The tyranny of the blank textbox is real. Seems LLMs would be way better at this sort of thing -- What can I do here, instead of "do I type help? man? apropos?"

hulitu 4y ago
> Can't each and every one of these criticisms be also leveled at CLIs? Don't we like CLIs? I notice I am confused. It is not about text. In CLIs you have a set of commands. In those interfaces you have some hidden commands which you must trigger with keywords.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Node and npm are notorious for having command line flags almost none of which are listed in the help, and less than half of which are documented on the website. I'm running node and npm flags in production deployment pipelines right now that I found on Stack Overflow or the bug database and exist nowhere on the official websites. And if you look at the historic documentation, the current situation is a factor of 3 improvement over even Node 10 or 12 era, which is far better than the node < 1.0 period What you say is true of good CLIs, not tire fires like Node.js. So you're both right depending on context.
  - b5n 4y ago
    I'm not sure how much time you spent on SO, but this only took me a couple of minutes of digging and I don't work with node. git clone https://github.com/nodejs/node.git grep -E -A 1 -R "Add(Option|Alias)" node/src/node_options.cc There may be options I've missed because I haven't dedicated more than a couple minutes to it, but I think this demonstrates a straightforward approach to diving a little deeper when necessary and should be easy to adjust/build upon depending on your case. Your gripe regarding documentation is legitimate, but if you're an engineer responsible for deployments who needs to go past typical usage consulting the source should be in your bag of tricks. Having a deeper understanding of the tools you use and rely on isn't going to hurt you or your career. https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Undocumented.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Undocumen...

pelorat 4y ago

> "people are bad at words" People are worse at command line interfaces and even clicking on buttons.

vonnik 4y ago

This is a limiting perspective inherently pessimistic about LLMs. The best NLP interfaces will be asking questions to the users, in order to figure out what their real problem is. This is similar to what teachers and therapists do. It is not a lazy interface, but a natural one. The chatbot will step the user through a decision tree in situations where the user doesn't know how to ask questions or frame the problem.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
A decision tree. Also known as a phone tree, which has been around for nigh-on 40 years now. You don't need AI for that.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  Decision trees are inherently limited on the different inputs it can take from the end user (yes/no etc.). The hope here, as I understand it, is to take free-form input from the user and map it back to one of the branches of the decision trees.
  - vonnik 4y ago
    It depends on how you define decision tree. We all gather information in order to recognize complex patterns and make decisions. Some of those decision flows are extremely deep, with complex inputs to determine the ultimate decision. Skilled teachers and therapists develop pattern recognition skills that allow them to tailor a response to the state of their interlocutor. That process is analogous to a decision tree, but feel free to apply another word to it if you like. Whatever we call it, I think chatbots will be able to do that, and I think that will be a good thing. Everybody's thinking about chatbots as a black box that answers our questions. That's not the real value. The real value is to give those bots much large multi-modal prompts about whatever problem we seek to solve, and let the LLM ask us the questions to ferret out features that are not superficially visible, so that it can give us better guidance.
azhenley 4y ago

haswell 4y ago

If my years as a product manager taught me anything, it’s that users absolutely do not know what they want in the moment. With enough time exploring the problem space, it becomes easier to tease out the real needs of the user. But this doesn’t happen overnight. Asking a user to interact with one of these chat interfaces is like asking them what they want - every time they use the software. This cognitive load would make me personally seek alternative tools.

hulitu 4y ago
> Asking a user to interact with one of these chat interfaces is like asking them what they want - every time they use the software. The ribbon is the same. Good luck finding something in it. But this seems to be the future.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  The ribbon (particularly in Microsoft Office) solves the problem that users don't know what they want, because it lays out all the options in front of them in a clearly organized hierarchy, with hover previews and textual labels for every command except for extremely well-known commands (like Bold/Italic). This is very different from chat interfaces, which are opaque black boxes and in order to get anything out of them users have to express their wish in words, with nothing to start from.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I'll just add here that it doesn't have to be only one or the other. The ribbon might be good for discovering features, but it's inefficient for using those features once discovered. If the user already knows what the thing they want is called, the fastest way to find it is a search bar that searches the labyrinth of menus and ribbons when you type into it. Google and Mac apps usually have this.
    - Too 4y ago
      Press Alt. It will highlight the key-binding to press to reach any item on the ribbon.

jasonjmcghee 4y ago

I agree that a singular text interface is far from an ideal ux, I do firmly believe providing smarter, more flexible command palettes will be a huge value-add to many user interfaces. Should you be able to interact manually - sure! But complex user interfaces tend to struggle with information architecture throughout their lifetime. Many of the obstacles could be well-mitigated by providing a declarative user experience - the easiest example is Jetbrains "Actions" interface. I wrote about my perspective in longer form a handful of months ago: https://productiveadventures.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-declarative-ux https://productiveadventures.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-decl...

seydor 4y ago

LLMs can also talk, not just listen

marcosdumay 4y ago
LLMs inherently do not know what questions to ask. Other algorithms know, but not them.
- seydor 4y ago
  "Ask me 10 random questions"

ddmma 4y ago

Adding machines into the way humans interact not only will make the experience more natural and enjoyable but definitely understand the environment both sides. I would celebrate the historic advancement of the technology instead of looking for flaws necessarily.

chinchilla2020 4y ago

The worst online MUD I ever played had a tutorial puzzle that was something like this. "Now, use the mechanisms on the catapult to launch the catapult" There was no other explanation of what your options were. I tried: 'pull the lever' 'release the spring' 'fire the catapult' 'pull back the lever' 'use the lever' It finally turned out to be something like "release the lever". The problem with chat is that you are attaching it to a rigid user interface that has a tiny subset of options compared to the breadth of human language. The user has to probe the awful chatbot for these options.

rednerrus 4y ago

I've had GPT-3 as a replacement to Siri on my Apple Watch for the last month or so and it's awesome.

monkpit 4y ago
How?
- rednerrus 4y ago
  https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/62624b2613b245698d81ebd9ac920c12 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/62624b2613b245698d81ebd9ac9...

janalsncm 4y ago

I still think voice should be the goal. It has been the universal API for thousands of years. All of us are probably “good with computers” by virtue of the fact that we figured out how to sign up but there are millions who aren’t. This isn’t an excuse to replace UIs or humans with horrible phone trees. I won’t defend the obvious race to the bottom. Hopefully better voice interfaces are here soon.

Barrin92 4y ago
given the extent to which audio phone calls have been replaced by text I'm always super sceptical of voice as the primary interface. It has so many disadvantages. No simple to see history, loud (by definition) in any non-private space, not composable, not easily copyable, very slow discovery, and so on. Voice is strictly serial. Tactile or visual interfaces you can just look at and move around in and immediately have a layout of the thing. Regardless of how smart the voice control is those issues are pretty intrinstic. There's also no 'halting state' to voice. That you can switch between different visual interfaces without losing your state is pretty necessary today. But you can't really stop or multitask audio controls sensibly.
- gbear605 4y ago
  Voice also simply doesn’t work for people with auditory issues (which includes many elderly people)! They theoretically could use video with a sign language, but there’s no way that that will be prioritized, especially with the “get 80% done and ignore the rest of the use cases” attitude that people have. Text to speech is the solution that they wind up using, but then what’s even the point? Thank god for the ADA at least.

soorya3 4y ago

Chatbot may be lazy user interface for some tasks but it is very good at assistive task like writing, coding, review etc. It is a language model and a foundation for other software products. Over time integrating with LLM into existing user interfaces will solve the problem you mentioned.

sigmonsays 4y ago

I wonder if there is something in rust that can be done to improve the LLM

Existenceblinks 4y ago
You missed opportunity of LL[V]M

intrasight 4y ago

Natural language is at least 100,000 years old. It's not lazy - it's just natural.

pottspotts 4y ago

I've largely used GPT as a replacement for Google, and I find it to be a lot smarter and faster. The criticisms the author level at it don't seem based on having used it for anything substantial. It is an excellent tool and a major step, and it will only get better and easier to use, it seems.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

Button is the goat user interface. Sound engineer devices, plane consoles, etc. I have the same thought since 2010, IIRC it was voice commands hype back then. I think they should focus on interfaceless learning model .. but I don't know what pure semantic they suppose to eat (learn) .. maybe TBs of XML lol.

anotheryou 4y ago

It's versatility that's king here. Sure a knob for "snow flake size" is nice, but most often I don't work on snowflakes and their sizes. But if I do in the near future I'm sure I can just say: "I used snowflake size in a lot of my prompts, can you just make it a knob for me?"

mk_stjames 4y ago

This parallels a longstanding critique I have of many modern user interfaces compared to slightly older software in the field of what I would consider 'power user' engineering tools; programs like FE tools, CAD & other CAE, etc. These are the kind of programs that had a stride starting in the late 90's to 2007-ish where they just slammed tons of toolbars around the edges of the screen, sometimes nesting functions or contexting workbenches but ultimately allowing the user to have everything exposed to them at once if needed. As screen real estate grew with higher res and larger monitors, the icons got smaller which was even better for the power user- you could fit even more on the screen if you wanted! But starting around 2008-2009 I noticed a trend, and it continues to this day- the power user oriented layouts started being replaced with more 'friendly', larger icon, children's game looking UI. Intuitive graphical icons were replaced with stylish, monotone shit that looks like a graphic design student's dream, but conveyed less instant information. I blame some of this shift on the move in Office to the Ribbon system and developers trying to imitate that, but some software I've seen takes that and does it much worse. I want all my functions laid out and accessible. Like this blog post mentions, sometimes I don't know what I am wanting to do until I see it. I want to be able to explore the entire space before I know what it all does, maybe. Using natural language can be very powerful if it augments these systems, but for many tools it isn't a replacement. Often I think new software is designed around looking impressive and fast to upper level management at the expense of the usability of the power users who ultimately are the users that get things done.

Def_Os 4y ago
Instead of the Ribbon, don't you think it was rise of tablets that influenced these design changes?
klabb3 4y ago
> Intuitive graphical icons were replaced with stylish, monotone shit that looks like a graphic design student's dream, but conveyed less instant information. Design is the art of signal-to-noise ratio, or in simpler terms, balance and harmony. If you over-use any modality, lines, text, color, nesting, you increase the noise level. If you underutilize a modality (for instance your whole UI is monochrome), you reduce your signal bandwidth. Every trend gets mindless followers, who throw the baby out with the bath water without even realizing it. But trends also bring a grain of gold to the table. For instance, monotone icons allow many more elements in the same screen real estate than text, and by not using color you can have a larger color budget for other elements, which you can use elsewhere to convey progress, status, or anything else important. A good use of monotone icons are text formatting (bold, justify, etc) and display options (column view, tree view, etc), or toolbars (like in photoshop or 3D tools). Many apps from the 2010 era overused colored icons, and I’m glad those went away. Some FOSS apps still suffer from that.

kris_wayton 4y ago

I agree it's not for everything, but it seems like better NLP/NLG could improve things like Alexa a lot. Alexa is fine for setting timers, turning off lights, etc. But currently when I ask it anything that Google Search or ChatGPT handles well, Alexa falls down and tells me the wrong info.

RyanShook 4y ago

Chat tools that help power users access features or settings inside of an app are where I think the immediate value is. App interfaces are super simple which reduces cognitive load on the user but hides many needed features. I have to hunt around so many app and website pages to find the setting I need and I think this is an area good chat interfaces can excel.

Xelynega 4y ago
How is it that CAD programs manage to be usable to power users with graphical interfaces and keybind then? If the problem is that UI has been dumbed down to the point of being unusable for the sake of design, then I don't think adding another layer on top is the solution.

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

Robert Sheckley said it way better in Ask a Foolish Question [1]: "In order to ask a question you must already know most of the answer." [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33854/pg33854-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33854/pg33854-images.ht...

freedude 4y ago

All user interfaces should be as challenging as Perl RegEx. Here is a great idea; for the answer to be valid make it required to be in the form of a Perl RegEx. That will get rid of the lazy people.

hulitu 4y ago
I think you never used a Microsoft GUI. PERL RegEx is deterministic.

cwalv 4y ago

Spot on. Now word can augment it's UI, maybe automatically recognizing when I'm writing a letter and offering to help with that specific task.

hulitu 4y ago
"Looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help with that ?" The good old days, when the first thing you do after installing Office was disabling Office Assistant.

davidkunz 4y ago

Chat interfaces are great if 1) you know what you want 2) the alternative would require manual navigation to multiple UIs and/or many interactions

corytheboyd 4y ago

Best of both worlds is a searchable action menu. Search matches action names as well as description, bonus points if it shows related actions as well. Actions have help documents if necessary. Solves the discovery problem, is still deterministic and sensible, doesn't need anything more fancy than full text search. Add ML if you have to, but for nothing more than a "suggested" list of actions, NOT as a replacement for deterministic search.

LASR 4y ago

100% Agree. When it comes to SeriousBusiness™, chat bots don't have sufficient constraints to extract specific input from free-form text. Applications are ultimately delivering value in a specific set of use-cases. Only some of those use-cases can be easily retrofitted with a chat-first interface. Consider something like Photoshop or Figma. There are so many ways you can issue commands that don't make sense. Eg: "Change the font-size on this color palette." Any sophisticated app will have these kinds of constraints. The user interface is not there only to accept input from the user. It also implicitly teaches the user some of the constraints in their apps. Without that, you're shifting the burden of understanding and maintaining the constraints to the user. And you're left with a (much smarter version) of "Hey Siri, do xyz...". This is a common ideation trap I see with PMs at the moment. The underlying problem again is that the human doesn't understand the limits of what their apps can do for them. As a second order, even if they did, humans can be bad at describing what they want to do.

dathinab 4y ago

lazy sure, but it's also the least precise by far tbh. the hardest part of many software projects is figuring out what really is needed I have seen startups with good tech and people fail because they slightly misjudged what their customers want and noticed way to late. A common cost driving factor when hiring a company to do a software project for you is that the requirements you legally agree one are not quite what you need so you have to pay for follow up changes. (This is also AFIK sometimes abused, initially underbidding the competition then "accidentally" creating a product which fits the requirements but not the actual needs and then selling overpriced follow up changes to an end code much higher then the competition would have been.)

philip1209 4y ago

Google's natural language interface seems to be popular.

phs 4y ago

Would databases have been better to work with if SQL didn't ape natural language? Would Excel, if it _did_ choose to embrace a "natural" macro syntax? Remember when CGI movies were all stuck in the uncanny valley? Turns out language has a valley too.

aogaili 4y ago

That textbook saves many clicks and Google searchers, questions and running around. It is not lazy; it is just a more effective tool, and humanity is all about progressive tech. So it is not being lazy; it is being..human.

colonwqbang 4y ago

This is really hitting the nail on the head. In the olden days there were prototypes like SHRDLU [1] which could be asked to do simple computing tasks. Is there something like that for GPT, a language model wired into a computing system that solves a concrete task? For instance, a simple image editing application with which the user can interact using natural language. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

ThomPete 4y ago

I call it lateral programming.

neilv 4y ago

I remember when Google started (I think it was still at Stanford then), and some professor was looking at my screen and remarking, irritated, about how it was just a text entry field with no indication of how people were supposed to use it. I figured he was probably thinking HCI "affordances", but I disagreed in this case. People were already typing search terms successfully, for indexers and even in Yahoo's directory. And Google's IR ranking model was noticeably much smarter than the existing Web ones, so I figured they'd also become smarter about interpreting whatever people typed (they'd get all the query data, and they could know what hits people clicked on for each).

superqd 4y ago

And yet it garnered millions of users within days. It has inspired people who don't do computers to feel like they can actually get amazing things done with computers. The pace of creative use cases discovered by non-tech types, with such a lazy interface, is nearly impossible to keep up with. It has democratized what is possible with technology, when that technology was programmable with natural language, i.e., by just asking questions, or asking it to do things, in every day language. It meant people who didn't know how to build software could get software to do their bidding regardless.

rajnathani 4y ago

Instead of natural language querying, having a “search for commands” shortcut which Google Docs has, but with using semantic search with GPT/LLM embeddings would be great! GPT3.5 (ChatGPT) seems easily resilient to typos too (eg: [0]). Also for latency, instead of a GPT-3/3.5 or other API based interactions, having a smaller openly available model to embed directly offline into the UI app frontend, like GPT2, BERT, etc. would make the most sense here. I’m sure Algolia or other startups might already be providing such a search system. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zew9ed/chatgpt_understanding_typos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zew9ed/chatgpt_und...

simplyluke 4y ago
This will be a use case - but I’d be deeply curious to understand the % of users who use that search for commands feature. I’d fully expect it’s less than 1%.

louison11 4y ago

It’s too binary of a perspective. NLP won’t replace graphical interfaces overall, but it will complement them. In cases where the user is wondering… maybe not so good. In cases where the user knows exactly what they want, or has a specific problem: excellent. And those cases are more frequent that some may realize. Banking, insurance, data management tools, messaging, question answering, recipe website, whatever you name it.

ninesnines 4y ago

I’ve been using ChatGPT with my research coding lately - but I think I’m very lucky to be at the point in my career where I can now debug things and think about the code that’s being presented to me with chat gpt, and let me tell you, I find a ton of errors in almost everything it presents me. But I have been exposed to so many more ways of organizing my code and solving problems that it has made me such a better coder. I feel that chat gpt for coding is perfect for people at my level; able to know enough to debug and write tests for everything, and know what the output should be, and yet not good enough at coding because they were home grown coders and haven’t been exposed to so many new ways of organizing and changing data.

ingenieroariel 4y ago

I have tried to teach everyone in my family to use Google with special keywords instead of natural language, for maybe 15 years. Much like how people who learned using books or articles diss on the people that learn using Youtube tutorials, LLMs via chat prompts and the iterative process may be better for the 90% of non pro users / developers out there even if we don't get it.

profstasiak 4y ago

i mean I hate chatbots, but it seems all the old people I know want me to be a "chatbot" for them. They tell me in natural language what they want, I talk with them and then fix their tech problems for them.