12 ms·

The case against conversational interfaces

279 points by nnx 2y ago

techpineapple 2y ago
There’s an interesting… paradox? Observation? That up until 20-30 years ago, humans were not computerized beings. I remember a thought leader at a company I worked at said that the future was wearable computing, a computer that disappears from your knowing and just integrates with your life. And that sounds great and human and has a very thought leadery sense of being forward thinking. But I think it’s wrong? Ever since the invention of the television, we’ve been absolutely addicted to screens. Screens and remotes, and I think there’s something sort of anti-humanly human about it. Maybe we don’t want to be human? But people I think would generally much rather tap their thumb on the remote than talk to their tv, and a visual interface you hold in the palm of your hand is not going away any time soon.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  Computers are tools, not people. They should be made easier to use as tools, not tried to be made people. I actually hate people, tools are much better.
- neom 2y ago
  I went through Waldorf education and although Rudolf Steiner is quite eccentric, one thing I think he was spot on about was regarding WHEN you introduce technology. He believed that introducing technology or mechanized thinking too early in childhood would hinder imaginative, emotional, and spiritual development. He emphasized that children should engage primarily with natural materials, imaginative play, storytelling, artistic activities, and movement, as opposed to being exposed prematurely to mechanical devices or highly structured thinking, I seem to recall he recommended this till the age of 6. My parents did this with me, no screens till 6 (wasn't so hard as I grew up in the early 90s, but still, no TV). I notice too how much people love screens, that non-judgmental glow of mental stimulation, it's wonderful, however I do think it's easier to "switch off" when you spent the first period of your life fully tuned in to the natural world. I hope folks are able to do this for their kids, it seems it would be quite difficult with all the noise in the world. Given it was hard for mine during the era of CRT and 4 channels, I have empathy for parents of today.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I will counter this by saying that my time spent with screens before 6 was unimaginably critical for me. If I hadn't had it, I would have been trapped by the racist, religously zealous, backwoods mentality that gripped the rest of my family and the majority of the people I grew up with. I discovered video games at age 3 and it changed EVERYTHING. It completely opened my mind to abstract thought and, among other things, influenced me to teach myself to read at age 3. I was reading at a collegiate level by age five and discovered another passion, books. Again, propelled me out of an extremely anti-intellectual upbringing. I simply could not imagine where I would be without video games, visual arts or books. Screens are not the problem. Absent parenting is the problem. Not teaching children the power of these screens is the problem.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      I second this motion. Technology is just a tool. It can be wisely used or not. Just forbidding it, is not wise in my opinion. You have to be careful to use it properly, or course. Also let me drop the thought here, that Rudolf Steiner, like Montesori and the like, shoot "this is good" "this is bad" based on "feeling" or intuition, or such. There were no extensive scientific studies behind it.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        The funny thing is that I remember the exact moment I fell in love with computers at 4. My grandmother cleaned houses and was often very late to pick me up from Headstart. So I would spend hours waiting, unsupervised, in a room with computer that had a giant note attached to the screen saying DO NOT TOUCH. >:) By 5, all I wanted was a computer. To me they represented and unending well of knowledge.
  - setr 2y ago
    I’ve been theory crafting around video games for children on the opposing premise. I think fundamentally the divide is on the quality of content — most games have some value to extract, but many are designed to be played inefficiently, and require far more time investment than value extracted. Eg Minecraft, Roblox, CoD, Fortnite, Dota/LoL, the various mobile games clearly have some kind of value (mechanical skill, hand-eye coordination, creative modes, 3D space navigation / translation / rotation, numeric optimization, social interaction, etc), but they’re also designed as massive timesinks mostly through creative mode or multiplayer. Games like paper Mario, pikmin, star control 2, katamari damacy, lego titles, however are all children-playable but far more time efficient and importantly time-bounded for play. Even within timesink games there are higher quality options — you definitely get more, and faster, out of satisfactory / factorio than modded Minecraft. If you can push kids towards the higher quality, lower timesink games, I think it’s worth. Fail to do so and it’s definitely not. The same applies to TV, movies, books, etc. Any medium of entertainment have horrendous timesinks to avoid, and if you can do so, avoiding the medium altogether is definitely a missed opportunity. Screens are only notable in that the degenerate cases are far more degenerate than anything that came before it
- bsder 2y ago
  > Screens and remotes, and I think there’s something sort of anti-humanly human about it. Actually, it's the reverse. The orienting response is wired in quite deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response When I was teaching, I used to force students using laptops to sit near the back of the room for exactly this reason. It's almost impossible for humans to ignore a flickering screen.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Sensitivity to stimuli behind orienting impulse varies by individual and I wish I was less sensitive on daily basis. These days screen brightness goes pretty high and it is unbelievable how many people seem to never use their screen (phone or laptop) on anything less than 100% brightness in any situation and are seemingly not bothered by flickering bright light or noise sources. I am nostalgic about old laptops’ dim LCD screens that I saw a few times as a kid, they did not flicker much and had a narrow angle of view. I suspect they would even be fine in a darkened classroom.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
      The last few times I've bought a new monitor, I've gone through the process of adjusting brightness based on comparing a document on screen to a paper sheet. This invariably results into going from defaults of 50-70% to very low figures like 5-15%, and it's not that I work in dark places, my offices have reasonable light from outside. I would be extremely uncomfortable using default settings, for me they are absurdly bright.
- King-Aaron 2y ago
  A flickering screen is modern man's flickering campfire.
- lrem 2y ago
  Playing computer games since an early age made me who I am. It required learning English a decade earlier than my peers. It pulled me into programming around start of primary school. I wouldn’t be a staff engineer in a western country without these two.
deleted 2y ago
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anthk 2y ago
Get a proper physical keyboard to write, and stop using smartphones as typing devices.
- eviks 2y ago
  Do you know of a foldable model that that can be used while walking?
pugio 2y ago
> The second thing we need to figure out is how we can compress voice input to make it faster to transmit. What’s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut? Can I prompt Claude faster with simple sounds and whistles? This reminds me of the amazing 2013 video of Travis Rudd coding python by voice: https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?si=AwBE_fk6Y88tLcos https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?si=AwBE_fk6Y88tLcos The number of times in the last few years I've wanted that level of "verbal hotkeys"... The latencies of many coding llms are still a little bit too low to allow for my ideal level of flow (though admittedly I haven't tried one's hosted on services like groq), but I can clearly envision a time when I'm issuing tight commands to a coder model that's chatting with me and watching my program evolve on screen in real time. On a somewhat related note to conversational interfaces, the other day I wanted to study some first aid stuff - used Gemini to read the whole textbook and generate Anki flash cards, then copied and pasted the flashcards directly into chat GPT voice mode and had it quiz me. That was probably the most miraculous experience of voice interface I've had in a long time - I could do chores while being constantly quizzed on what I wanted to learn, and anytime I had a question or comment I could just ask it to explain or expound on a term or tangent.
- WhyIsItAlwaysHN 2y ago
  I worked like that for a year in uni because of RSI and it's very easy to get voice strain if you use your voice for coding like that. Many short commands is very tiring for the voice. It's also hard to dictate code without a lot of these commands because it's very dense in information. I hope something else will be the solution. Maybe LLMs being smart enough to guess the code out of a very short description and then a set of corrections.
  - mplanchard 2y ago
    Would be nice to be able to do something like write a function signature and then just say “fill out this function,” with it having the implicit needed context, as though it had been pairing with you all along and is just taking the wheel for a second. Or when you’ve finished writing a function, “test this function with some happy path inputs.” I feel like I’d appreciate that kind of use, which could integrate decently into the flow state I get into when programming. The current suite of tools for me often feels too clunky, with the need to explicitly manage context and queries: it takes me out of my flow state and feels slower than just doing it myself.
cdrini 2y ago
Completely agree, voice UI is best as an augmentation of our current HCI patterns with keyboard/mouse. I think one of the reasons this is, is because our brains kind of have separate buffers for visual memory and aural memory (Baddeley's working memory model). Most computer use takes up the visual buffer, and our aural buffer has extra bandwidth. This also means we can do things aurally while still maintaining focus/attention on what we're doing visually, allowing a kind of multitasking. One thing I will note is that I'm not sure I buy the example for voice UIs being inefficient. I've almost never said "Alexa what's the weather like in Toronto?". I just say "Alexa, weather". And that's much faster than taking my phone out and opening an app. I don't think we need to compress voice input. Language kind of auto-compresses, since we create new words for complex concepts when we find the need. For example, in a book club we recently read "As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow". We almost immediately stopped referring to it by the full title, and instead just called it "lemons" because we had to refer to it so much. Eg "Did you finish lemons yet?" or "This book is almost as good as lemons!". The context let shorten the word. Similarly the context of my location shortens the word to just "weather". I think this might be the way the voice UIs can be made more efficient: in the same way human speech makes itself more efficient.
- XorNot 2y ago
  I feel like the people using Voice Attack or whatever in space sims zeroed in on this. It's very useful being able to request auxillary functions without losing your focus, and I think that would apply to say, word editing as well - e.g. being able to say "insert a date here" rather the having to get into the menus to find it. Conversely, latency would be a big issue.
- incognito124 2y ago
  > This also means we can do things aurally while still maintaining focus/attention on what we're doing visually, allowing a kind of multitasking. Maybe you, but I most definitely cannot focus on different things aurally and visually. I never successfully listened to something in the background while doing something else. I can't even talk properly if I'm typing something on a computer.
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mjfl 2y ago
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rimeice 2y ago
Individual UIs have been built for every product that has a UI with specific shortcuts and specific techniques you learn to use that tool. I don’t see why the same couldn’t apply for speech interfaces. The article does mention we haven’t figured out shortcuts like the thumbs up equivalent in speech yet but doesn’t explore that further. I can imagine specific words or combinations of words being used to control certain software that you have to learn. Eventually there would be some unification for common tasks.
- Arainach 2y ago
  Speaking is fundamentally slower than typing or using a mouse, and it is a catastrophically bad choice if you are not alone in a room.
nottorp 2y ago
> because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically. > That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer! He means automation of routine tasks? Took 50 years to reach that in the example. What if you want to do something new? Will the thought guessing module in your computer even allow that?
- chongli 2y ago
  I don't know, but I feel like we already have the "telepathic grandfather interface." Or at least we try to have it. My iPhone is constantly guessing at things to suggest to me (I use the share button a lot in different apps) and it's wrong more often than not, forcing me to constantly hunt for things (to say nothing about autocorrect, which is constantly changing correct words that I'd previously typed into incorrect ones)! It doesn't even use a basic, sensible LRU eviction policy. It has some totally inscrutable method of determining what to suggest! If we want an interface that actually lets us work near the speed of thought, it can't be anything that re-arranges options behind our back all the time. Imagine if you went into your kitchen to cook something and the contents of all your drawers and cupboards had been re-arranged without your knowledge! It would be a total nightmare! We already knew decades ago that spatial interfaces [1] are superior to everything else when it comes to working quickly. You can walk into a familiar room and instinctively turn on a light by reaching for the switch without even looking. With a well-organized kitchen an experienced chef (or even a skilled home cook) can cook a very complicated dish very efficiently when they know where all of the utensils are so that they don't need to go hunting for everything. Yet today it seems like all software is constantly trying to guess what we want and in the process ends up rearranging everything so that we never feel comfortable using our computers anymore. I REALLY miss using Mac OS 9 (and earlier). At some point I need to set up some vintage Macs to use it again, though its usefulness at browsing the web is rather limited these days (mostly due to protocol changes, but also due to JavaScript). It'd be really nice to have a modern browser running on a vintage Mac, though the limited RAM would be a serious problem. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
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randomfool 2y ago
And yet here we are, discussing this in a threaded conversation.
- graemep 2y ago
  It is a discussion with other human beings. Very different.
novaRom 2y ago
> AI needs to work at the OS level Absolutely agree. An agent running in the background.
m463 2y ago
"the case against" You know, doesn't matter what you say. If businesses want something, they'll do it to you whether it's the best interface or not. Amazon forces "the rabble" into their chatbot customer service system, and hides access to people. People get touchscreens in their car and fumble to turn on their fog lights or defrost in bad weather. They get voice assistant phone trees and angrily yell "operator and agent". I really wish there were true competition that would let people choose what works for them.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
This clearly elucidated a number of things I've tried to explain to people who are so excited about "conversations" with computers. The example I've used (with varying levels of effectiveness) was to get someone to think about driving their car by only talking to it. Not a self driving car that does the driving for you, but telling it things like: turn, accelerate, stop, slow down, speed up, put on the blinker, turn off the blinker, etc. It would be annoying and painful and you couldn't talk to your passenger while you were "driving" because that might make the car do something weird. My point, and I think it was the author's as well, is that you aren't "conversing" with your computer, you are making it do what you want. There are simpler, faster, and more effective ways to do that then to talk at it with natural language.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Honestly that just says that the interface is too low level. Telling a car to drive you to some place and make it fast is how we interact with taxi drivers. It works fine as a concept, it just needs a higher level of abstraction that isn't there yet.
  - MatekCopatek 2y ago
    This only works for tasks where the details of execution are not important. Driving fits that category well, but many other tasks we're throwing at AI don't.
  - citrin_ru 2y ago
    Selecting pick-up/drop-off points on a map for me easier than explaining in words and that’s on of appeals of uber like services.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      It's easier up until it's time to drop you off, and the selected dropoff point is suboptimal or plain impossible to stop at, and you want to give the car last-minute directions. Then the traditional, "human driver way" of looking out the window and telling them where to go based on what you see is far superior than trying to perspective-switch between the 3D situated view and imprecise, finicky 2D map interface.
Peteragain 2y ago
"Like writing, my ChatGPT conversation is a thinking process – not an interaction that happens post-thought" - Brilliant! I have worked on computers and language for over 30 years and the ups and downs certainly make such a passion a CLA (career limiting activity). I am adding the citation to my bibtex file ..
matthewsinclair 2y ago
Strong agreement on this one. I’ve been referring to this as a UI/UX cul de sac to anyone who’ll listen for a while now. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42934190#42935946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42934190#42935946
perlgeek 2y ago
> To put the writing and speaking speeds into perspective, we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute. Natural language might be natural, but it’s a bottleneck. We might form fleeting thoughts much faster than we can express them, but if we want to formulate thoughts clearly enough to express them to other people, I think we're close to the ~150 words per minute we can actually speak. I recently listened to a Linguistics podcast (lingthusiasm, though I don't recall which episode) where they talked about the efficiency of different languages, and that in the end they all end up roughly the same, because it's really the thought processes that limit the amount of information you communicate, not the language production.
- tgv 2y ago
  There is no evidence for any of that. Thoughts can form relatively quickly, but there's no way we can keep that up. Thoughts seem to stick around for a while. And thoughts develop over time. They're often not conceived complete. That has been shown with some clever experiments. And language production also puts a limit on our communication channel. It is probably optimized to convert communication intent into motor actions. It surely takes its time. That is not a problem for the system, since motor actions are slow. Idk where "lingthusiam" gets their ideas from, but there's psycholinguistic literature dating back to the 1920s that is often neglected by linguists.
benob 2y ago
To me natural language interfaces are like the mouse-driven menu vs terminal interpreter. They allow good discoverability in systems that we don't master at the cost of efficiency. As always, good UI allows for using multiple modalities.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  Yes, this is exactly it. For things that I do rarely, I would love to have a working natural language interface because I know what I want to do, but I don't know how to do it. Even if there were more efficient ways to achieve my goal, since I do not know what they are, the inefficiencies of a natural language interface do not matter to me. In this sense, natural language interfaces are more powerful search features rather than a replacement for other types of interfaces.
- chthonicdaemon 2y ago
  I feel like chat interfaces have terrible discoverability. You can ask for anything but you have no idea what the system can actually do. In the menu system the options were all spelled out - that's what discoverability means to me. If you spend enough time going through the menus and dialogs you will find all the options, and in a well-designed interface you might notice a function you didn't know about near the one you're using now. What chat interfaces have over CLIs is good robustness. You can word your request in lots of different ways and get a useful answer.
- benrutter 2y ago
  Yesyesyesyes! I do wish I could think of more examples supporting both well. VSCode is probably the best I can think of, where keyboard shortcuts can get you up to a decent speed as an advanced user, but mouse clicks provide an easy intro for a new user. For the most part, I see tools like NVim, which is super fast but not new-user friendly. Or IOS, which a toddler can navigate, but doesn't afford many ways to speed up interactions like typing.
break_the_bank 2y ago
shameless plug here but we have been building in a similar space. We call it tabtabtab.ai - https://tabtabtab.ai/ https://tabtabtab.ai/ The core loop is promptless ai that’s guided by accessibility x screenshots & it’s everywhere on your Mac. You can snap this comment section or the front page and we’ll structure it for you if it’s a spreadsheet or write a tweet if you’re on Twitter.
- meowface 2y ago
  I can't zoom in to your website on my phone without an email subscription prompt blocking the screen that I can't easily close, and each new zoom in or out repeats it. Also, unless I'm missing something, the app is called TabTabTab while its only feature is copy & paste? Tabbing doesn't seem to be mentioned at all. I'm guessing tabbing is involved but there doesn't seem to be a word about it except from users referencing it in the reviews. It seems to only bill itself as "magic copy-paste".
nitwit005 2y ago
> I’m not entirely sure where this obsession with conversational interfaces comes from. There's a very similar obsession with the idea that things should be visual instead of textual. We tend to end up back at text. Personal suspicion for both is the media set a lot of people's expectations. They loudly talked to the computer in films like 2001 or Star Trek for drama reasons, and all the movie computers generally fancy visual interactions.
android521 2y ago
>I admit that the title of this essay is a bit misleading (made you click though, didn’t it?). This isn’t really a case against conversational interfaces, it’s a case against zero-sum thinking. No matter the intention or quality of the article, i do not like this kind of deceitful link-bait article. It may have higher quality than pure link-bait but nobody like to be deceived
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I simply saw that as tongue in cheek about how the author wanted to use a more general core point. The lens of conversational interfaces makes a good case for that while keeping true to the idea. You can argue against something but also not think it's 100% useless.
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  I did not find the article to be deceitful at all. He does make a case against overuse of conversational interfaces. The author is just humbly acknowledging his position is more nuanced than the title of article might suggest.
  - mpalmer 2y ago
    "Humbly"? The author has full control over the title, and in addition to being bait, the title is not humble at all. Not a case against, but the case against.
macleginn 2y ago
I agree with some of the sentiments in the post, but I am somewhat surprised by the framing. Why make ‘a case’ against something that will clearly win or lose depending on adoption? Is the author suggestion that we should not be betting our money or resources on developing this? In this case we need more details for particular use cases, I would say.
janpmz 2y ago
Speaking and pronouncing words feels like more effort and requires more attention than typing on my keyboard or moving the mouse.
notarobot123 2y ago
What if apps published a declarative interface for context specific commands? Conversational interfaces would glue together spoken instructions with sensible matches from the set of available contextual interfaces.
PeterStuer 2y ago
Here's where the article goes wrong: 1. "Natural language is a data transfer mechanism" 2. "Data transfer mechanisms have two critical factors: speed and lossiness" 3. "Natural language has neither" While a conversational interface does transfer information, its main qualities are what I always refer to as "blissfull ignorance" and "intelligent interpretation". Blisfull ignorance allows the requester to state an objective while not being required to know or even be right in how to achieve it. It is the opposite of operational command. Do as I mean, not as I say. "Intelligent Interpretation" allows the receiver the freedom to infer an intention in the communication rather than a command. It also allows for contextual interactions such as goal oriented partial clarification and elaboration. The more capable of intelligent interpretation the request execution system is, the more appropriate a conversational interface will be. Think of it as managing a team. If they are junior, inexperienced and not very bright, you will probably tend towards handholding, microtasking and micromanagement to get things done. If you have a team of senior, experienced and bright engineers, you can with a few words point out a desire and, trust them to ask for information when there is relevant ambiguity, and expect a good outcome without having to detail manage every minute of their days.
- deleted 2y ago
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- throwaway290 2y ago
  > If you have a team of senior, experienced and bright engineers, you can with a few words point out a desire and, trust them to ask for information when there is relevant ambiguity, and expect a good outcome It's such a fallacy. First thing an experienced and bright engineer will tell you is to leave the premises with your "few words about a desire" and not return without actual specs and requirements formalized in some way. If you do not understand what you want yourself, it means hours/days/weeks/months/literally years of back and forths and broken solutions and wasted time, because natural language is slow and lossy af (the article hits the nail on the head on this one). Re "ask for information", my favorite example is when you say one thing if I ask you today and then you reply something else (maybe the opposite, it happened) if I ask you a week later because you forgot or just changed your mind. I bet a conversational interface will deal with this just fine /s
gatinsama 2y ago
It is a huge turnoff for me when futuristic series use conversational interfaces. It happened in the Expanse and was hard to watch. For anyone who likes to think, learn, and tinker with user interfaces (HCI in general), it's obviously a high-latency and noisy channel.
- internet_points 2y ago
  I actually found that quite reasonable. E.g. they were using it to sort and filter data, just like people today use llm's to write their R script and (avoid having to) figure out how to invoke gnuplot. I'm sure somewhere in that computer it's still invoking gnuplot under a century of vibe-coded moldy spaghetti code =P I don't remember where else they used voice, they had a lot of other interface types they switched between. Tried searching for a clip and found this quote: > The voice interface had been problematic from the start. > The original owner was Chinese so, I turned the damn thing off. So yes, quite realistic :-)
- woile 2y ago
  I think the expanse nails it quite well. I really like when they move the videos from one screen to another. Or when they interact with the ship, they use all kind of outputs, voice, screens, buttons. For planning together, they talk and the machine renders, but then they have screens or even bracelets to interact.
willtemperley 2y ago
2001: A Space Odyssey was the original case against conversational interfaces.
3l3ktr4 2y ago
I disagree with the author when they say something along the lines of “why don’t we use buttons instead of using these new assistive technology? Buttons are much faster, and I proved humans like fast.” I think that’s false. Why after 10 years of software development I haven’t learned EMACS? Because I’m lazy, because I don’t think it’s the bottleneck of my work. My bottleneck might be creativity or knowledge and conversational interfaces might be the best thing there are for these (in the lack of a knowledgeable and kind human, which the author also seems to agree with). Anyway, I don’t know, I found the title a bit disconnected from the content and the conclusions a bit overlappingly confusing but this is a complicated question. In the end I agree that we want a mix of things, we want a couple of keyboard strokes and we want chats. But most of all we probably want direct brain interface! ;)
matsemann 2y ago
Not exactly the same case as the article, but just a few minutes ago I booked a time for vaccinations online, and it was done through a chat interface. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/OWv7deF https://imgur.com/a/OWv7deF Just infuriating. Instead of a normal date- and timepicker where I could see available slots, it's a chat where you have to click certain options. Then I had to reply "Ja" (yes) when it asked me if I had clicked the correct date. And then when none of the times of the day suited me, I couldn't just click a new date on the previous message, I instead have to press "vis datovelger på nytt"/show datepicker again, and get a new chat message where I this time select a different date and answer "Ja" again to see the available time slots. It's slow and useless. The title bar of the page says "Microsoft Copilot Studio", some fancy tech instead of a simple form..
- immibis 2y ago
  That sounds like a great interface if your goal is to take power away from the user. We could even show an ad every third prompt.
var_cw 2y ago
have few thoughts on this, esp after working in voice AI since couple of years 1. > "What’s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut?" Current ASR systems are much narrow in terms of just capturing the transcript. there is no higher level of intelligence, even the best of GPT voice models fail at this. Humans are highly receptive of non-verbal cues. All the uhms, ahs, even the pauses we take is where the nuance lies. 2. the hardware for voice AI is still not consumer ready interacting with a voice AI is still doesn't feel private. i am only able to do a voice based interaction only when am in my car. sadly at other places it just feels a privacy breach as its acoustically public. have been thinking about a private microphones to enable more AI based conversations.
byschii 2y ago
(assuming privacy is handled correctly) i like the idea of my pc always having a side-channel for communication of "simpler" things. I m not sure how it could fit in to my 2 modalities of work: (i) alone in complete focus / silence (ii) in the office where there is already too much spoken communication between humans... maybe it s just a matter of getting used to it
heisenbit 2y ago
The way I think is in-band vs. out-of-band control. The former is initially convenient but can blow up in surprising ways and remains a source of security issues.
levmiseri 2y ago
WPM and other attempts at putting a one specific number/metric to point to is imo only mudding the waters. Better way to think about just how awfully slow natural language (on average) is as an interface is to think about interactions with {whatever} in terms of *intents* and *actions*. Comparing "What's the weather in London" with clicking the weather app icon is misleading and too simplistic. When people imagine a future driven by conversational interfaces, they usually picture use cases like: 1. "When is my next train leaving?" 2. "Show me my photos from the vacation in Italy with yellow flowers on them" 3. "Book a flight from New York to Zurich on {dates}" ... And a way to highlight what's faster/less-noisy is to compare how natural language vs. mouse/touch maps onto the Intent -> Action. The thing is that interactions like these are generally so much more complex. E.g. Does the machine know what 'my' train is? If it doesn't, can it offer reasonable disambiguation? If it can't, what then? And does it present the information in a way where the next likely action is reachable, or will I need to converse about it? You could picture a long table listing similar use cases in different contexts and compare various input methods and modalities and their speed. Flicking a finger on a 2d surface or using a mouse and a keyboard is going to be — on average — much faster and with less dead-ends. Conversational interfaces are not the future. Imo even in the sense of 'augmenting', it's not going to happen. Natural-language driven interface will always play the role of a supporting (still important, though!) role. An accessibility aid when e.g. temporarily, permanently, or contextually not able to use the primary input method to 'encode your intent'.
eviks 2y ago
> but we’ve never found a mobile equivalent for keyboard shortcuts. Guess why we still don’t have a truly mobile-first productivity app after almost 20 years since the introduction of the iPhone? Has it even been tried? Is there an iPhone text editing app with fully customizable keyboard that allows for setting up modes/gestures/shortcuts, scriptable if necessary? > A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San Francisco today?” just takes 10x longer than simply tapping the weather app on your homescreen. That's not entirely fair, the natural language could just as well be side button + saying "Weather" with the same result, though you can make app availability even easier by just displaying weather results on the homescreen without tapping
- walterbell 2y ago
  Blackberry physical keyboard had many shortcuts, https://defkey.com/blackberry-10-classic-shortcuts https://defkey.com/blackberry-10-classic-shortcuts iPad physical keyboards also have shortcuts.
  - eviks 2y ago
    These are both desktop equivalents using an actual desktop keyboard or a mini variant thereof
    - walterbell 2y ago
      Why is Blackberry a desktop equivalent? It preceded iPhone by many years, with unique workflows that varied by model.
      - eviks 2y ago
        Because it's literally a physical=desktop keyboard, just smaller in size while almost all current mobile interfaces are touch based?(also, the question wasn't about uniqueness, but productivity levels of a desktop productivity app, think about code editors with extensions, keyboard and mouse gesture customization. What did they have in their touch interfaces?
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Star Trek continues to be prescient. It not only introduced the conversational interface to the masses, it also nailed its proper uses in ways we're still (re)discovering now. If you pay attention to how the voice interface is used in Star Trek (TNG and upwards), it's basically exactly what the article is saying - it complements manual inputs and works as a secondary channel. Nobody is trying to manually navigate the ship by voicing out specific control inputs, or in the midst of a battle, call out "computer, fire photon torpedoes" - that's what the consoles are for (and there are consoles everywhere). Voice interface is secondary - used for delegation, queries (that may be faster to say than type), casual location-independent use (lights, music; they didn't think of kitchen timers, though (then again, replicators)), brainstorming, etc. Yes, this is a fictional show and the real reason for voice interactions was to make it a form of exposition, yadda yadda - but I'd like to think that all those people writing the script, testing it, acting and shooting it, were in perfect position to tell which voice interactions made sense and which didn't: they'd know what feels awkward or nonsensical when acting, or what comes off this way when watching it later.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I have similar thoughts on LCARS: the Doylist requirement for displays that are bold enough and large enough to feel meaningful even when viewed on a 1990-era TV, are also the requirements for real life public information displays. At first glance it feels like real life will not benefit from labelling 90% of the glowing rectangles with numbers as the show does, but second thoughts say spreadsheets and timetables.
- blatantly 2y ago
  I remember Picard barking out commands to make the ship do preprogrammed evasion or fight maneuvers too. This seems like another good use.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Yeah, this and I think even weapons control, happened on the show. But the scenario for these cases is when the bridge is understaffed for episode-specific plot reasons, and the protagonist has to simultaneously operate systems usually handled by distinct stations. That's when you get an officer e.g. piloting the shuttle/runabout while barking out commands to manage power flow, or voice-ordering evasions while manually operating weapons, etc. (Also worth noting is that "pre-programmed evasion patterns" are used in normal circumstances, too. "Evasive maneuver JohnDoe Alpha Three" works just as well when spoken to the helm officer as to a computer. I still don't know whether such preprogrammed maneuvers make sense in real-life setting, though.)
Aardwolf 2y ago
I'd be ok with a conversational interface if I can use it to improve my non-conversational UI. E.g. say I find the scrollbars somewhere way too thin and invisible and I want thick high contrast scrollbars, and nobody thought of implementing that? Ask the AI and it changes your desktop interface to do it immediately.
fellerts 2y ago
> To put the writing and speaking speeds into perspective, we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute. Natural language might be natural, but it’s a bottleneck. Natural language is very lossy: forming a thought and conveying that through speech or text is often an exercise in frustration. So where does "we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute" come from? The author clearly had a point about the efficiency of thought vs. natural language, but his thought was lost in a layer of translation. Probably because thoughts don't map cleanly onto words: I may lack some prerequisite knowledge to graph what the author is saying here, which pokes at the core of the issue: language is imperfect, so the statement "we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute" makes no sense to me. Meta-joking aside, is "we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute" an established fact? It's oddly specific.
- paulluuk 2y ago
  I'm also curious about this -- I'm pretty sure that I think actual words at about the speed at which I can speak them. I can not speak 3000 words per minute. I also have my doubts about the numbers put forward on reading, listening and speaking. When reading, again I can read words about as fast as I can speak words. When I'm reading, I am essentially speaking out the words but in my mind. Is that not how other people read?
  - fellerts 2y ago
    It sounds like you have a strong inner monologue. Some people do, some don't. I don't subvocalize (no inner voice when reading). Words aren't involved when I think about stuff. I don't have an inner "voice" at all, only when I'm trying to communicate. Maybe I need to more "translating" from thought to voice than you do? This stuff is fascinating.
  - whatevertrevor 2y ago
    Nope. Plenty people don't have an internal monologue, and even if they do it's not on all the time. For me, when I need to think clearly about a specific/novel thing, a monologue helps, but I don't voice out thoughts like "I need a drink right now". Also I read much faster than I speak, I have to slow down while reading fiction as a result.
wewewedxfgdf 2y ago
There have abeen a few of these posts on HN redcently - people who claim that AI/LLM are just some sort of passing fad or of no value or less value than people are saying anyway. People who write these posts want to elevate their self value by nay-saying what is popular. I don't understand the psychology but it seems like that sort of pattern to me. It takes a deliberate blindness to say that AI/LLMs are just some sort of thing that has popped up every few years and this is the same as them and it will fade away. Why would someone choose to be so blind and dismissive of something obviously fundamentally world changing? Again - it's the instinct to knock down the tall poppy and therefore prove that you have some sort of strength/value.
- gertrunde 2y ago
  I have to suspect that your post is based on assumptions from the (somewhat misleading) post title, rather than from reading the article content. The following is a direct quite from the article: "None of this is to say that LLMs aren’t great. I love LLMs. I use them all the time. In fact, I wrote this very essay with the help of an LLM."
whatnow37373 2y ago
It's no wonder extraverted normie and managerial types that get through their day by talking think throwing words at a problem is the best thing since sliced bread. They have problems like "compose an email that vaguely makes the impression I'm considering various options but I'm actually not" and for that, I suspect, the conversational workflow is quite good. Anyone else that actually just does the stuff is viscerally aware of how sub-optimal it is to throw verbiage at a computer. I guess it depends on what level of abstraction you're working at.
- sevensor 2y ago
  The best executives to work for are the ones who are able to be as precise at their level of abstraction as I am at mine. There’s a shared understanding at an intermediate level, and we can resolve misunderstandings quickly. And then there are the executives who think we should just feed our transducer data into an llm.
woile 2y ago
I was recently at a cafe using the computer in Argentina, and I was thinking it would be impossible to use a voice interface here. Everyone chatting so loud I could barely hear my own thoughts.
vakkermans 2y ago
I appreciate the attempt at making sense of conversational interfaces, but I don't think natural language as a "data transfer mechanism" is a productive way of doing it. Natural language isn't best described as data transfer. It's primarily a mechanism for collaboration and negotiation. A speech act isn't transferring data, it's an action with intent. Viewed as such the key metrics are not speed and loss, but successful coordination. This is a case where a computer science stance isn't fruitful, and it's best to look through a linguistics lens.
earcar 2y ago
Who's actually making the claim we should replace everything with natural language? Almost nobody serious. This article sets up a bit of a strawman while making excellent points. What we're really seeing is specific applications where conversation makes sense, not a wholesale revolution. Natural language shines for complex, ambiguous tasks but is hilariously inefficient for things like opening doors or adjusting volume. The real insight here is about choosing the right interface for the job. We don't need philosophical debates about "the future of computing" - we need pragmatic combinations of interfaces that work together seamlessly. The butter-passing example is spot on, though. The telepathic anticipation between long-married couples is exactly what good software should aspire to. Not more conversation, but less need for it. Where Julian absolutely nails it is the vision of AI as an augmentation layer rather than replacement. That's the realistic future - not some chat-only dystopia where we're verbally commanding our way through tasks that a simple button press would handle more efficiently. The tech industry does have these pendulum swings where we overthink basic interaction models. Maybe we could spend less time theorizing about natural language as "the future" and more time just building tools that solve real problems with whatever interface makes the most sense.
- mattmanser 2y ago
  I don't think it's a straw man, there's lots of people who think it might, or under vague impressions that it might. Plenty of less technical people. Because they haven't thought it through. The article is useful as it's enunciated arguments which many of us have intuited, but are not necessarily able to explain ourselves.
incorrecthorse 2y ago
> we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute I would like to know what this measures exactly. The reason I often prefer writing to talking is because writing lets me the time to pause and think. In those cases the bottleneck is very clearly my thought process (which, at least consciously, doesn't appear to me as "words").
hipinspire 2y ago
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ev-williams-should-have-launched-snapchat-medium-nigel-marko-bijelic/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ev-williams-should-have-launc...
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DabeDotCom 2y ago
> It was like they were communicating telepathically. > > That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer! The problem is, "The Only Thing Worse Than Computers Making YOU Do Everything... Is When They Do Everything *FOR* You!" "ad3} and "aP might not be "discoverable" vi commands, but they're fast and precise. Plus, it's easier to teach a human to think like a computer than to teach a computer to think like a human — just like it's easier to teach a musician to act than to teach an actor how to play an instrument — but I admit, it's not as scalable; you can't teach everyone Fortran or C, so we end up looking for these Pareto Principle shortcuts: Javascript provides 20% of the functionality, and solves 80% of the problems. But then people find Javascript too hard, so they ask ChatGPT/Bard/Gemini to write it for them. Another 20% solution — of the original 20% is now 4% as featureful — but it solves 64% of the world's problems. (And it's on pace to consume 98% of the world's electricity, but I digress!) PS: Mobile interfaces don't HAVE to suck for typing; I could FLY on my old Treo! But "modern" UI eschews functionality for "clean" brutalist minimalism. "Why make it easy to position your cursor when we spent all that money developing auto-conflict?" «sigh»
- grbsh 2y ago
  I think we can have the best of both worlds here. We want the precision and speed of using vi commands, but we want the discoverability of GUI document editors. LLMs may be able to solve the discoverability problem. If the editor can be highly confident that you want to use a given a command, for example, it can give you an intellisense like completion option. I don't think we've cracked the code on how this UX should work yet though -- as evidenced by how many people find cursor/copilot autocompletion suggestions so frustrating. The other great thing about this mode is that it can double as a teaching methodology. If I have a complicated interface that is not very discoverable, it may be hard to sell potential users on the time investment required to learn everything. Why would I want to invest hours into learning non-transferrable knowledge when I'm not even sure I want to go with this option versus a competitor? It will be a far better experience if I can first vibe-use the product , and if it's right for me, I'll probably be incented to learn the inner workings of it as I try to do more and more.
  - 2y ago
spprashant 2y ago
Anyone know how to figure out the web stack for this blog? Its elegant, minimal, and has enough support for some rich elements which add to the experience.
alnwlsn 2y ago
Somebody showed me a text-to-CAD AI tool recently, and I can't help but feel that whoever made it doesn't understand that people who use CAD aren't trying to solve the problem of "make a model of a rubber duck" but something more like "make a custom angle bracket which mounts part number xxxyyyy". Sure, you can try to describe what you want in words, but there's a reason machine shops want drawings and not a 300 word poem like you're a 14th century monk. Much much easier to just draw a picture.
- stevage 2y ago
  Surely those text based tools exist for people who aren't CAD experts. I don't know CAD. But a tool that let me type in a description of a thing and then send it off to be 3D printed sounds pretty great to me.
sebastiennight 2y ago
The author seems to ignore the main case for conversational interfaces - which is not to replace the software, but the software user. Not telling your car to turn left or right, but telling your cab driver you're going to the airport. This is our usecase at our startup[1] - we want to enable tiny SMBs who didn't have the budget to hire a "video guy", to get an experience similar to having one. And that's why we're switching to a conversational UX (because those users would normally communicate with the "video guy" or girl by sending them a Whatsapp message, not by clicking buttons on the video software) [1] https://www.onetake.ai https://www.onetake.ai
stevage 2y ago
> “This is it! The next computing paradigm is here! We’ll only use natural language going forward!” Is anyone actually making any argument like that? The whole piece feels like a giant strawman.
paulsutter 2y ago
One-way voice is the right answer. Keep the UI, even the mouse and keyboard. But let me speak requests instead of typing literally everything
resurrected 2y ago
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karemmom 2y ago
[flagged]

279 points by nnx 2y ago

There’s an interesting… paradox? Observation? That up until 20-30 years ago, humans were not computerized beings. I remember a thought leader at a company I worked at said that the future was wearable computing, a computer that disappears from your knowing and just integrates with your life. And that sounds great and human and has a very thought leadery sense of being forward thinking. But I think it’s wrong? Ever since the invention of the television, we’ve been absolutely addicted to screens. Screens and remotes, and I think there’s something sort of anti-humanly human about it. Maybe we don’t want to be human? But people I think would generally much rather tap their thumb on the remote than talk to their tv, and a visual interface you hold in the palm of your hand is not going away any time soon.

LoganDark 2y ago
Computers are tools, not people. They should be made easier to use as tools, not tried to be made people. I actually hate people, tools are much better.
neom 2y ago
I went through Waldorf education and although Rudolf Steiner is quite eccentric, one thing I think he was spot on about was regarding WHEN you introduce technology. He believed that introducing technology or mechanized thinking too early in childhood would hinder imaginative, emotional, and spiritual development. He emphasized that children should engage primarily with natural materials, imaginative play, storytelling, artistic activities, and movement, as opposed to being exposed prematurely to mechanical devices or highly structured thinking, I seem to recall he recommended this till the age of 6. My parents did this with me, no screens till 6 (wasn't so hard as I grew up in the early 90s, but still, no TV). I notice too how much people love screens, that non-judgmental glow of mental stimulation, it's wonderful, however I do think it's easier to "switch off" when you spent the first period of your life fully tuned in to the natural world. I hope folks are able to do this for their kids, it seems it would be quite difficult with all the noise in the world. Given it was hard for mine during the era of CRT and 4 channels, I have empathy for parents of today.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I will counter this by saying that my time spent with screens before 6 was unimaginably critical for me. If I hadn't had it, I would have been trapped by the racist, religously zealous, backwoods mentality that gripped the rest of my family and the majority of the people I grew up with. I discovered video games at age 3 and it changed EVERYTHING. It completely opened my mind to abstract thought and, among other things, influenced me to teach myself to read at age 3. I was reading at a collegiate level by age five and discovered another passion, books. Again, propelled me out of an extremely anti-intellectual upbringing. I simply could not imagine where I would be without video games, visual arts or books. Screens are not the problem. Absent parenting is the problem. Not teaching children the power of these screens is the problem.
  - f1shy 2y ago
    I second this motion. Technology is just a tool. It can be wisely used or not. Just forbidding it, is not wise in my opinion. You have to be careful to use it properly, or course. Also let me drop the thought here, that Rudolf Steiner, like Montesori and the like, shoot "this is good" "this is bad" based on "feeling" or intuition, or such. There were no extensive scientific studies behind it.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      The funny thing is that I remember the exact moment I fell in love with computers at 4. My grandmother cleaned houses and was often very late to pick me up from Headstart. So I would spend hours waiting, unsupervised, in a room with computer that had a giant note attached to the screen saying DO NOT TOUCH. >:) By 5, all I wanted was a computer. To me they represented and unending well of knowledge.
- setr 2y ago
  I’ve been theory crafting around video games for children on the opposing premise. I think fundamentally the divide is on the quality of content — most games have some value to extract, but many are designed to be played inefficiently, and require far more time investment than value extracted. Eg Minecraft, Roblox, CoD, Fortnite, Dota/LoL, the various mobile games clearly have some kind of value (mechanical skill, hand-eye coordination, creative modes, 3D space navigation / translation / rotation, numeric optimization, social interaction, etc), but they’re also designed as massive timesinks mostly through creative mode or multiplayer. Games like paper Mario, pikmin, star control 2, katamari damacy, lego titles, however are all children-playable but far more time efficient and importantly time-bounded for play. Even within timesink games there are higher quality options — you definitely get more, and faster, out of satisfactory / factorio than modded Minecraft. If you can push kids towards the higher quality, lower timesink games, I think it’s worth. Fail to do so and it’s definitely not. The same applies to TV, movies, books, etc. Any medium of entertainment have horrendous timesinks to avoid, and if you can do so, avoiding the medium altogether is definitely a missed opportunity. Screens are only notable in that the degenerate cases are far more degenerate than anything that came before it
bsder 2y ago
> Screens and remotes, and I think there’s something sort of anti-humanly human about it. Actually, it's the reverse. The orienting response is wired in quite deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienting_response When I was teaching, I used to force students using laptops to sit near the back of the room for exactly this reason. It's almost impossible for humans to ignore a flickering screen.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Sensitivity to stimuli behind orienting impulse varies by individual and I wish I was less sensitive on daily basis. These days screen brightness goes pretty high and it is unbelievable how many people seem to never use their screen (phone or laptop) on anything less than 100% brightness in any situation and are seemingly not bothered by flickering bright light or noise sources. I am nostalgic about old laptops’ dim LCD screens that I saw a few times as a kid, they did not flicker much and had a narrow angle of view. I suspect they would even be fine in a darkened classroom.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
    The last few times I've bought a new monitor, I've gone through the process of adjusting brightness based on comparing a document on screen to a paper sheet. This invariably results into going from defaults of 50-70% to very low figures like 5-15%, and it's not that I work in dark places, my offices have reasonable light from outside. I would be extremely uncomfortable using default settings, for me they are absurdly bright.
King-Aaron 2y ago
A flickering screen is modern man's flickering campfire.
lrem 2y ago
Playing computer games since an early age made me who I am. It required learning English a decade earlier than my peers. It pulled me into programming around start of primary school. I wouldn’t be a staff engineer in a western country without these two.

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anthk 2y ago

Get a proper physical keyboard to write, and stop using smartphones as typing devices.

eviks 2y ago
Do you know of a foldable model that that can be used while walking?

pugio 2y ago

> The second thing we need to figure out is how we can compress voice input to make it faster to transmit. What’s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut? Can I prompt Claude faster with simple sounds and whistles? This reminds me of the amazing 2013 video of Travis Rudd coding python by voice: https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?si=AwBE_fk6Y88tLcos https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?si=AwBE_fk6Y88tLcos The number of times in the last few years I've wanted that level of "verbal hotkeys"... The latencies of many coding llms are still a little bit too low to allow for my ideal level of flow (though admittedly I haven't tried one's hosted on services like groq), but I can clearly envision a time when I'm issuing tight commands to a coder model that's chatting with me and watching my program evolve on screen in real time. On a somewhat related note to conversational interfaces, the other day I wanted to study some first aid stuff - used Gemini to read the whole textbook and generate Anki flash cards, then copied and pasted the flashcards directly into chat GPT voice mode and had it quiz me. That was probably the most miraculous experience of voice interface I've had in a long time - I could do chores while being constantly quizzed on what I wanted to learn, and anytime I had a question or comment I could just ask it to explain or expound on a term or tangent.

WhyIsItAlwaysHN 2y ago
I worked like that for a year in uni because of RSI and it's very easy to get voice strain if you use your voice for coding like that. Many short commands is very tiring for the voice. It's also hard to dictate code without a lot of these commands because it's very dense in information. I hope something else will be the solution. Maybe LLMs being smart enough to guess the code out of a very short description and then a set of corrections.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  Would be nice to be able to do something like write a function signature and then just say “fill out this function,” with it having the implicit needed context, as though it had been pairing with you all along and is just taking the wheel for a second. Or when you’ve finished writing a function, “test this function with some happy path inputs.” I feel like I’d appreciate that kind of use, which could integrate decently into the flow state I get into when programming. The current suite of tools for me often feels too clunky, with the need to explicitly manage context and queries: it takes me out of my flow state and feels slower than just doing it myself.

cdrini 2y ago

Completely agree, voice UI is best as an augmentation of our current HCI patterns with keyboard/mouse. I think one of the reasons this is, is because our brains kind of have separate buffers for visual memory and aural memory (Baddeley's working memory model). Most computer use takes up the visual buffer, and our aural buffer has extra bandwidth. This also means we can do things aurally while still maintaining focus/attention on what we're doing visually, allowing a kind of multitasking. One thing I will note is that I'm not sure I buy the example for voice UIs being inefficient. I've almost never said "Alexa what's the weather like in Toronto?". I just say "Alexa, weather". And that's much faster than taking my phone out and opening an app. I don't think we need to compress voice input. Language kind of auto-compresses, since we create new words for complex concepts when we find the need. For example, in a book club we recently read "As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow". We almost immediately stopped referring to it by the full title, and instead just called it "lemons" because we had to refer to it so much. Eg "Did you finish lemons yet?" or "This book is almost as good as lemons!". The context let shorten the word. Similarly the context of my location shortens the word to just "weather". I think this might be the way the voice UIs can be made more efficient: in the same way human speech makes itself more efficient.

XorNot 2y ago
I feel like the people using Voice Attack or whatever in space sims zeroed in on this. It's very useful being able to request auxillary functions without losing your focus, and I think that would apply to say, word editing as well - e.g. being able to say "insert a date here" rather the having to get into the menus to find it. Conversely, latency would be a big issue.
incognito124 2y ago
> This also means we can do things aurally while still maintaining focus/attention on what we're doing visually, allowing a kind of multitasking. Maybe you, but I most definitely cannot focus on different things aurally and visually. I never successfully listened to something in the background while doing something else. I can't even talk properly if I'm typing something on a computer.
- 2y ago

mjfl 2y ago

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rimeice 2y ago

Individual UIs have been built for every product that has a UI with specific shortcuts and specific techniques you learn to use that tool. I don’t see why the same couldn’t apply for speech interfaces. The article does mention we haven’t figured out shortcuts like the thumbs up equivalent in speech yet but doesn’t explore that further. I can imagine specific words or combinations of words being used to control certain software that you have to learn. Eventually there would be some unification for common tasks.

Arainach 2y ago
Speaking is fundamentally slower than typing or using a mouse, and it is a catastrophically bad choice if you are not alone in a room.

nottorp 2y ago

> because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically. > That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer! He means automation of routine tasks? Took 50 years to reach that in the example. What if you want to do something new? Will the thought guessing module in your computer even allow that?

chongli 2y ago
I don't know, but I feel like we already have the "telepathic grandfather interface." Or at least we try to have it. My iPhone is constantly guessing at things to suggest to me (I use the share button a lot in different apps) and it's wrong more often than not, forcing me to constantly hunt for things (to say nothing about autocorrect, which is constantly changing correct words that I'd previously typed into incorrect ones)! It doesn't even use a basic, sensible LRU eviction policy. It has some totally inscrutable method of determining what to suggest! If we want an interface that actually lets us work near the speed of thought, it can't be anything that re-arranges options behind our back all the time. Imagine if you went into your kitchen to cook something and the contents of all your drawers and cupboards had been re-arranged without your knowledge! It would be a total nightmare! We already knew decades ago that spatial interfaces [1] are superior to everything else when it comes to working quickly. You can walk into a familiar room and instinctively turn on a light by reaching for the switch without even looking. With a well-organized kitchen an experienced chef (or even a skilled home cook) can cook a very complicated dish very efficiently when they know where all of the utensils are so that they don't need to go hunting for everything. Yet today it seems like all software is constantly trying to guess what we want and in the process ends up rearranging everything so that we never feel comfortable using our computers anymore. I REALLY miss using Mac OS 9 (and earlier). At some point I need to set up some vintage Macs to use it again, though its usefulness at browsing the web is rather limited these days (mostly due to protocol changes, but also due to JavaScript). It'd be really nice to have a modern browser running on a vintage Mac, though the limited RAM would be a serious problem. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
- 2y ago

randomfool 2y ago

And yet here we are, discussing this in a threaded conversation.

graemep 2y ago
It is a discussion with other human beings. Very different.

novaRom 2y ago

> AI needs to work at the OS level Absolutely agree. An agent running in the background.

m463 2y ago

"the case against" You know, doesn't matter what you say. If businesses want something, they'll do it to you whether it's the best interface or not. Amazon forces "the rabble" into their chatbot customer service system, and hides access to people. People get touchscreens in their car and fumble to turn on their fog lights or defrost in bad weather. They get voice assistant phone trees and angrily yell "operator and agent". I really wish there were true competition that would let people choose what works for them.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

This clearly elucidated a number of things I've tried to explain to people who are so excited about "conversations" with computers. The example I've used (with varying levels of effectiveness) was to get someone to think about driving their car by only talking to it. Not a self driving car that does the driving for you, but telling it things like: turn, accelerate, stop, slow down, speed up, put on the blinker, turn off the blinker, etc. It would be annoying and painful and you couldn't talk to your passenger while you were "driving" because that might make the car do something weird. My point, and I think it was the author's as well, is that you aren't "conversing" with your computer, you are making it do what you want. There are simpler, faster, and more effective ways to do that then to talk at it with natural language.

moffkalast 2y ago
Honestly that just says that the interface is too low level. Telling a car to drive you to some place and make it fast is how we interact with taxi drivers. It works fine as a concept, it just needs a higher level of abstraction that isn't there yet.
- MatekCopatek 2y ago
  This only works for tasks where the details of execution are not important. Driving fits that category well, but many other tasks we're throwing at AI don't.
- citrin_ru 2y ago
  Selecting pick-up/drop-off points on a map for me easier than explaining in words and that’s on of appeals of uber like services.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's easier up until it's time to drop you off, and the selected dropoff point is suboptimal or plain impossible to stop at, and you want to give the car last-minute directions. Then the traditional, "human driver way" of looking out the window and telling them where to go based on what you see is far superior than trying to perspective-switch between the 3D situated view and imprecise, finicky 2D map interface.

Peteragain 2y ago

"Like writing, my ChatGPT conversation is a thinking process – not an interaction that happens post-thought" - Brilliant! I have worked on computers and language for over 30 years and the ups and downs certainly make such a passion a CLA (career limiting activity). I am adding the citation to my bibtex file ..

matthewsinclair 2y ago

Strong agreement on this one. I’ve been referring to this as a UI/UX cul de sac to anyone who’ll listen for a while now. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42934190#42935946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42934190#42935946

perlgeek 2y ago

> To put the writing and speaking speeds into perspective, we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute. Natural language might be natural, but it’s a bottleneck. We might form fleeting thoughts much faster than we can express them, but if we want to formulate thoughts clearly enough to express them to other people, I think we're close to the ~150 words per minute we can actually speak. I recently listened to a Linguistics podcast (lingthusiasm, though I don't recall which episode) where they talked about the efficiency of different languages, and that in the end they all end up roughly the same, because it's really the thought processes that limit the amount of information you communicate, not the language production.

tgv 2y ago
There is no evidence for any of that. Thoughts can form relatively quickly, but there's no way we can keep that up. Thoughts seem to stick around for a while. And thoughts develop over time. They're often not conceived complete. That has been shown with some clever experiments. And language production also puts a limit on our communication channel. It is probably optimized to convert communication intent into motor actions. It surely takes its time. That is not a problem for the system, since motor actions are slow. Idk where "lingthusiam" gets their ideas from, but there's psycholinguistic literature dating back to the 1920s that is often neglected by linguists.

benob 2y ago

To me natural language interfaces are like the mouse-driven menu vs terminal interpreter. They allow good discoverability in systems that we don't master at the cost of efficiency. As always, good UI allows for using multiple modalities.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Yes, this is exactly it. For things that I do rarely, I would love to have a working natural language interface because I know what I want to do, but I don't know how to do it. Even if there were more efficient ways to achieve my goal, since I do not know what they are, the inefficiencies of a natural language interface do not matter to me. In this sense, natural language interfaces are more powerful search features rather than a replacement for other types of interfaces.
chthonicdaemon 2y ago
I feel like chat interfaces have terrible discoverability. You can ask for anything but you have no idea what the system can actually do. In the menu system the options were all spelled out - that's what discoverability means to me. If you spend enough time going through the menus and dialogs you will find all the options, and in a well-designed interface you might notice a function you didn't know about near the one you're using now. What chat interfaces have over CLIs is good robustness. You can word your request in lots of different ways and get a useful answer.
benrutter 2y ago
Yesyesyesyes! I do wish I could think of more examples supporting both well. VSCode is probably the best I can think of, where keyboard shortcuts can get you up to a decent speed as an advanced user, but mouse clicks provide an easy intro for a new user. For the most part, I see tools like NVim, which is super fast but not new-user friendly. Or IOS, which a toddler can navigate, but doesn't afford many ways to speed up interactions like typing.

break_the_bank 2y ago

shameless plug here but we have been building in a similar space. We call it tabtabtab.ai - https://tabtabtab.ai/ https://tabtabtab.ai/ The core loop is promptless ai that’s guided by accessibility x screenshots & it’s everywhere on your Mac. You can snap this comment section or the front page and we’ll structure it for you if it’s a spreadsheet or write a tweet if you’re on Twitter.

meowface 2y ago
I can't zoom in to your website on my phone without an email subscription prompt blocking the screen that I can't easily close, and each new zoom in or out repeats it. Also, unless I'm missing something, the app is called TabTabTab while its only feature is copy & paste? Tabbing doesn't seem to be mentioned at all. I'm guessing tabbing is involved but there doesn't seem to be a word about it except from users referencing it in the reviews. It seems to only bill itself as "magic copy-paste".

nitwit005 2y ago

> I’m not entirely sure where this obsession with conversational interfaces comes from. There's a very similar obsession with the idea that things should be visual instead of textual. We tend to end up back at text. Personal suspicion for both is the media set a lot of people's expectations. They loudly talked to the computer in films like 2001 or Star Trek for drama reasons, and all the movie computers generally fancy visual interactions.

android521 2y ago

>I admit that the title of this essay is a bit misleading (made you click though, didn’t it?). This isn’t really a case against conversational interfaces, it’s a case against zero-sum thinking. No matter the intention or quality of the article, i do not like this kind of deceitful link-bait article. It may have higher quality than pure link-bait but nobody like to be deceived

johnnyanmac 2y ago
I simply saw that as tongue in cheek about how the author wanted to use a more general core point. The lens of conversational interfaces makes a good case for that while keeping true to the idea. You can argue against something but also not think it's 100% useless.
indoordin0saur 2y ago
I did not find the article to be deceitful at all. He does make a case against overuse of conversational interfaces. The author is just humbly acknowledging his position is more nuanced than the title of article might suggest.
- mpalmer 2y ago
  "Humbly"? The author has full control over the title, and in addition to being bait, the title is not humble at all. Not a case against, but the case against.

macleginn 2y ago

I agree with some of the sentiments in the post, but I am somewhat surprised by the framing. Why make ‘a case’ against something that will clearly win or lose depending on adoption? Is the author suggestion that we should not be betting our money or resources on developing this? In this case we need more details for particular use cases, I would say.

janpmz 2y ago

Speaking and pronouncing words feels like more effort and requires more attention than typing on my keyboard or moving the mouse.

notarobot123 2y ago

What if apps published a declarative interface for context specific commands? Conversational interfaces would glue together spoken instructions with sensible matches from the set of available contextual interfaces.

PeterStuer 2y ago

Here's where the article goes wrong: 1. "Natural language is a data transfer mechanism" 2. "Data transfer mechanisms have two critical factors: speed and lossiness" 3. "Natural language has neither" While a conversational interface does transfer information, its main qualities are what I always refer to as "blissfull ignorance" and "intelligent interpretation". Blisfull ignorance allows the requester to state an objective while not being required to know or even be right in how to achieve it. It is the opposite of operational command. Do as I mean, not as I say. "Intelligent Interpretation" allows the receiver the freedom to infer an intention in the communication rather than a command. It also allows for contextual interactions such as goal oriented partial clarification and elaboration. The more capable of intelligent interpretation the request execution system is, the more appropriate a conversational interface will be. Think of it as managing a team. If they are junior, inexperienced and not very bright, you will probably tend towards handholding, microtasking and micromanagement to get things done. If you have a team of senior, experienced and bright engineers, you can with a few words point out a desire and, trust them to ask for information when there is relevant ambiguity, and expect a good outcome without having to detail manage every minute of their days.

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throwaway290 2y ago
> If you have a team of senior, experienced and bright engineers, you can with a few words point out a desire and, trust them to ask for information when there is relevant ambiguity, and expect a good outcome It's such a fallacy. First thing an experienced and bright engineer will tell you is to leave the premises with your "few words about a desire" and not return without actual specs and requirements formalized in some way. If you do not understand what you want yourself, it means hours/days/weeks/months/literally years of back and forths and broken solutions and wasted time, because natural language is slow and lossy af (the article hits the nail on the head on this one). Re "ask for information", my favorite example is when you say one thing if I ask you today and then you reply something else (maybe the opposite, it happened) if I ask you a week later because you forgot or just changed your mind. I bet a conversational interface will deal with this just fine /s

gatinsama 2y ago

It is a huge turnoff for me when futuristic series use conversational interfaces. It happened in the Expanse and was hard to watch. For anyone who likes to think, learn, and tinker with user interfaces (HCI in general), it's obviously a high-latency and noisy channel.

internet_points 2y ago
I actually found that quite reasonable. E.g. they were using it to sort and filter data, just like people today use llm's to write their R script and (avoid having to) figure out how to invoke gnuplot. I'm sure somewhere in that computer it's still invoking gnuplot under a century of vibe-coded moldy spaghetti code =P I don't remember where else they used voice, they had a lot of other interface types they switched between. Tried searching for a clip and found this quote: > The voice interface had been problematic from the start. > The original owner was Chinese so, I turned the damn thing off. So yes, quite realistic :-)
woile 2y ago
I think the expanse nails it quite well. I really like when they move the videos from one screen to another. Or when they interact with the ship, they use all kind of outputs, voice, screens, buttons. For planning together, they talk and the machine renders, but then they have screens or even bracelets to interact.

willtemperley 2y ago

2001: A Space Odyssey was the original case against conversational interfaces.

3l3ktr4 2y ago

I disagree with the author when they say something along the lines of “why don’t we use buttons instead of using these new assistive technology? Buttons are much faster, and I proved humans like fast.” I think that’s false. Why after 10 years of software development I haven’t learned EMACS? Because I’m lazy, because I don’t think it’s the bottleneck of my work. My bottleneck might be creativity or knowledge and conversational interfaces might be the best thing there are for these (in the lack of a knowledgeable and kind human, which the author also seems to agree with). Anyway, I don’t know, I found the title a bit disconnected from the content and the conclusions a bit overlappingly confusing but this is a complicated question. In the end I agree that we want a mix of things, we want a couple of keyboard strokes and we want chats. But most of all we probably want direct brain interface! ;)

matsemann 2y ago

Not exactly the same case as the article, but just a few minutes ago I booked a time for vaccinations online, and it was done through a chat interface. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/OWv7deF https://imgur.com/a/OWv7deF Just infuriating. Instead of a normal date- and timepicker where I could see available slots, it's a chat where you have to click certain options. Then I had to reply "Ja" (yes) when it asked me if I had clicked the correct date. And then when none of the times of the day suited me, I couldn't just click a new date on the previous message, I instead have to press "vis datovelger på nytt"/show datepicker again, and get a new chat message where I this time select a different date and answer "Ja" again to see the available time slots. It's slow and useless. The title bar of the page says "Microsoft Copilot Studio", some fancy tech instead of a simple form..

immibis 2y ago
That sounds like a great interface if your goal is to take power away from the user. We could even show an ad every third prompt.

var_cw 2y ago

have few thoughts on this, esp after working in voice AI since couple of years 1. > "What’s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut?" Current ASR systems are much narrow in terms of just capturing the transcript. there is no higher level of intelligence, even the best of GPT voice models fail at this. Humans are highly receptive of non-verbal cues. All the uhms, ahs, even the pauses we take is where the nuance lies. 2. the hardware for voice AI is still not consumer ready interacting with a voice AI is still doesn't feel private. i am only able to do a voice based interaction only when am in my car. sadly at other places it just feels a privacy breach as its acoustically public. have been thinking about a private microphones to enable more AI based conversations.

byschii 2y ago

(assuming privacy is handled correctly) i like the idea of my pc always having a side-channel for communication of "simpler" things. I m not sure how it could fit in to my 2 modalities of work: (i) alone in complete focus / silence (ii) in the office where there is already too much spoken communication between humans... maybe it s just a matter of getting used to it

heisenbit 2y ago

The way I think is in-band vs. out-of-band control. The former is initially convenient but can blow up in surprising ways and remains a source of security issues.

levmiseri 2y ago

WPM and other attempts at putting a one specific number/metric to point to is imo only mudding the waters. Better way to think about just how awfully slow natural language (on average) is as an interface is to think about interactions with {whatever} in terms of *intents* and *actions*. Comparing "What's the weather in London" with clicking the weather app icon is misleading and too simplistic. When people imagine a future driven by conversational interfaces, they usually picture use cases like: 1. "When is my next train leaving?" 2. "Show me my photos from the vacation in Italy with yellow flowers on them" 3. "Book a flight from New York to Zurich on {dates}" ... And a way to highlight what's faster/less-noisy is to compare how natural language vs. mouse/touch maps onto the Intent -> Action. The thing is that interactions like these are generally so much more complex. E.g. Does the machine know what 'my' train is? If it doesn't, can it offer reasonable disambiguation? If it can't, what then? And does it present the information in a way where the next likely action is reachable, or will I need to converse about it? You could picture a long table listing similar use cases in different contexts and compare various input methods and modalities and their speed. Flicking a finger on a 2d surface or using a mouse and a keyboard is going to be — on average — much faster and with less dead-ends. Conversational interfaces are not the future. Imo even in the sense of 'augmenting', it's not going to happen. Natural-language driven interface will always play the role of a supporting (still important, though!) role. An accessibility aid when e.g. temporarily, permanently, or contextually not able to use the primary input method to 'encode your intent'.

eviks 2y ago

> but we’ve never found a mobile equivalent for keyboard shortcuts. Guess why we still don’t have a truly mobile-first productivity app after almost 20 years since the introduction of the iPhone? Has it even been tried? Is there an iPhone text editing app with fully customizable keyboard that allows for setting up modes/gestures/shortcuts, scriptable if necessary? > A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San Francisco today?” just takes 10x longer than simply tapping the weather app on your homescreen. That's not entirely fair, the natural language could just as well be side button + saying "Weather" with the same result, though you can make app availability even easier by just displaying weather results on the homescreen without tapping

walterbell 2y ago
Blackberry physical keyboard had many shortcuts, https://defkey.com/blackberry-10-classic-shortcuts https://defkey.com/blackberry-10-classic-shortcuts iPad physical keyboards also have shortcuts.
- eviks 2y ago
  These are both desktop equivalents using an actual desktop keyboard or a mini variant thereof
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Why is Blackberry a desktop equivalent? It preceded iPhone by many years, with unique workflows that varied by model.
    - eviks 2y ago
      Because it's literally a physical=desktop keyboard, just smaller in size while almost all current mobile interfaces are touch based?(also, the question wasn't about uniqueness, but productivity levels of a desktop productivity app, think about code editors with extensions, keyboard and mouse gesture customization. What did they have in their touch interfaces?

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Star Trek continues to be prescient. It not only introduced the conversational interface to the masses, it also nailed its proper uses in ways we're still (re)discovering now. If you pay attention to how the voice interface is used in Star Trek (TNG and upwards), it's basically exactly what the article is saying - it complements manual inputs and works as a secondary channel. Nobody is trying to manually navigate the ship by voicing out specific control inputs, or in the midst of a battle, call out "computer, fire photon torpedoes" - that's what the consoles are for (and there are consoles everywhere). Voice interface is secondary - used for delegation, queries (that may be faster to say than type), casual location-independent use (lights, music; they didn't think of kitchen timers, though (then again, replicators)), brainstorming, etc. Yes, this is a fictional show and the real reason for voice interactions was to make it a form of exposition, yadda yadda - but I'd like to think that all those people writing the script, testing it, acting and shooting it, were in perfect position to tell which voice interactions made sense and which didn't: they'd know what feels awkward or nonsensical when acting, or what comes off this way when watching it later.

ben_w 2y ago
I have similar thoughts on LCARS: the Doylist requirement for displays that are bold enough and large enough to feel meaningful even when viewed on a 1990-era TV, are also the requirements for real life public information displays. At first glance it feels like real life will not benefit from labelling 90% of the glowing rectangles with numbers as the show does, but second thoughts say spreadsheets and timetables.
blatantly 2y ago
I remember Picard barking out commands to make the ship do preprogrammed evasion or fight maneuvers too. This seems like another good use.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Yeah, this and I think even weapons control, happened on the show. But the scenario for these cases is when the bridge is understaffed for episode-specific plot reasons, and the protagonist has to simultaneously operate systems usually handled by distinct stations. That's when you get an officer e.g. piloting the shuttle/runabout while barking out commands to manage power flow, or voice-ordering evasions while manually operating weapons, etc. (Also worth noting is that "pre-programmed evasion patterns" are used in normal circumstances, too. "Evasive maneuver JohnDoe Alpha Three" works just as well when spoken to the helm officer as to a computer. I still don't know whether such preprogrammed maneuvers make sense in real-life setting, though.)

Aardwolf 2y ago

I'd be ok with a conversational interface if I can use it to improve my non-conversational UI. E.g. say I find the scrollbars somewhere way too thin and invisible and I want thick high contrast scrollbars, and nobody thought of implementing that? Ask the AI and it changes your desktop interface to do it immediately.

fellerts 2y ago

> To put the writing and speaking speeds into perspective, we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute. Natural language might be natural, but it’s a bottleneck. Natural language is very lossy: forming a thought and conveying that through speech or text is often an exercise in frustration. So where does "we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute" come from? The author clearly had a point about the efficiency of thought vs. natural language, but his thought was lost in a layer of translation. Probably because thoughts don't map cleanly onto words: I may lack some prerequisite knowledge to graph what the author is saying here, which pokes at the core of the issue: language is imperfect, so the statement "we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute" makes no sense to me. Meta-joking aside, is "we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute" an established fact? It's oddly specific.

paulluuk 2y ago
I'm also curious about this -- I'm pretty sure that I think actual words at about the speed at which I can speak them. I can not speak 3000 words per minute. I also have my doubts about the numbers put forward on reading, listening and speaking. When reading, again I can read words about as fast as I can speak words. When I'm reading, I am essentially speaking out the words but in my mind. Is that not how other people read?
- fellerts 2y ago
  It sounds like you have a strong inner monologue. Some people do, some don't. I don't subvocalize (no inner voice when reading). Words aren't involved when I think about stuff. I don't have an inner "voice" at all, only when I'm trying to communicate. Maybe I need to more "translating" from thought to voice than you do? This stuff is fascinating.
- whatevertrevor 2y ago
  Nope. Plenty people don't have an internal monologue, and even if they do it's not on all the time. For me, when I need to think clearly about a specific/novel thing, a monologue helps, but I don't voice out thoughts like "I need a drink right now". Also I read much faster than I speak, I have to slow down while reading fiction as a result.

wewewedxfgdf 2y ago

There have abeen a few of these posts on HN redcently - people who claim that AI/LLM are just some sort of passing fad or of no value or less value than people are saying anyway. People who write these posts want to elevate their self value by nay-saying what is popular. I don't understand the psychology but it seems like that sort of pattern to me. It takes a deliberate blindness to say that AI/LLMs are just some sort of thing that has popped up every few years and this is the same as them and it will fade away. Why would someone choose to be so blind and dismissive of something obviously fundamentally world changing? Again - it's the instinct to knock down the tall poppy and therefore prove that you have some sort of strength/value.

gertrunde 2y ago
I have to suspect that your post is based on assumptions from the (somewhat misleading) post title, rather than from reading the article content. The following is a direct quite from the article: "None of this is to say that LLMs aren’t great. I love LLMs. I use them all the time. In fact, I wrote this very essay with the help of an LLM."

whatnow37373 2y ago

It's no wonder extraverted normie and managerial types that get through their day by talking think throwing words at a problem is the best thing since sliced bread. They have problems like "compose an email that vaguely makes the impression I'm considering various options but I'm actually not" and for that, I suspect, the conversational workflow is quite good. Anyone else that actually just does the stuff is viscerally aware of how sub-optimal it is to throw verbiage at a computer. I guess it depends on what level of abstraction you're working at.

sevensor 2y ago
The best executives to work for are the ones who are able to be as precise at their level of abstraction as I am at mine. There’s a shared understanding at an intermediate level, and we can resolve misunderstandings quickly. And then there are the executives who think we should just feed our transducer data into an llm.

woile 2y ago

I was recently at a cafe using the computer in Argentina, and I was thinking it would be impossible to use a voice interface here. Everyone chatting so loud I could barely hear my own thoughts.

vakkermans 2y ago

I appreciate the attempt at making sense of conversational interfaces, but I don't think natural language as a "data transfer mechanism" is a productive way of doing it. Natural language isn't best described as data transfer. It's primarily a mechanism for collaboration and negotiation. A speech act isn't transferring data, it's an action with intent. Viewed as such the key metrics are not speed and loss, but successful coordination. This is a case where a computer science stance isn't fruitful, and it's best to look through a linguistics lens.

earcar 2y ago

Who's actually making the claim we should replace everything with natural language? Almost nobody serious. This article sets up a bit of a strawman while making excellent points. What we're really seeing is specific applications where conversation makes sense, not a wholesale revolution. Natural language shines for complex, ambiguous tasks but is hilariously inefficient for things like opening doors or adjusting volume. The real insight here is about choosing the right interface for the job. We don't need philosophical debates about "the future of computing" - we need pragmatic combinations of interfaces that work together seamlessly. The butter-passing example is spot on, though. The telepathic anticipation between long-married couples is exactly what good software should aspire to. Not more conversation, but less need for it. Where Julian absolutely nails it is the vision of AI as an augmentation layer rather than replacement. That's the realistic future - not some chat-only dystopia where we're verbally commanding our way through tasks that a simple button press would handle more efficiently. The tech industry does have these pendulum swings where we overthink basic interaction models. Maybe we could spend less time theorizing about natural language as "the future" and more time just building tools that solve real problems with whatever interface makes the most sense.

mattmanser 2y ago
I don't think it's a straw man, there's lots of people who think it might, or under vague impressions that it might. Plenty of less technical people. Because they haven't thought it through. The article is useful as it's enunciated arguments which many of us have intuited, but are not necessarily able to explain ourselves.

incorrecthorse 2y ago

> we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute I would like to know what this measures exactly. The reason I often prefer writing to talking is because writing lets me the time to pause and think. In those cases the bottleneck is very clearly my thought process (which, at least consciously, doesn't appear to me as "words").

hipinspire 2y ago

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ev-williams-should-have-launched-snapchat-medium-nigel-marko-bijelic/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ev-williams-should-have-launc...

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DabeDotCom 2y ago

> It was like they were communicating telepathically. > > That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer! The problem is, "The Only Thing Worse Than Computers Making YOU Do Everything... Is When They Do Everything *FOR* You!" "ad3} and "aP might not be "discoverable" vi commands, but they're fast and precise. Plus, it's easier to teach a human to think like a computer than to teach a computer to think like a human — just like it's easier to teach a musician to act than to teach an actor how to play an instrument — but I admit, it's not as scalable; you can't teach everyone Fortran or C, so we end up looking for these Pareto Principle shortcuts: Javascript provides 20% of the functionality, and solves 80% of the problems. But then people find Javascript too hard, so they ask ChatGPT/Bard/Gemini to write it for them. Another 20% solution — of the original 20% is now 4% as featureful — but it solves 64% of the world's problems. (And it's on pace to consume 98% of the world's electricity, but I digress!) PS: Mobile interfaces don't HAVE to suck for typing; I could FLY on my old Treo! But "modern" UI eschews functionality for "clean" brutalist minimalism. "Why make it easy to position your cursor when we spent all that money developing auto-conflict?" «sigh»

grbsh 2y ago
I think we can have the best of both worlds here. We want the precision and speed of using vi commands, but we want the discoverability of GUI document editors. LLMs may be able to solve the discoverability problem. If the editor can be highly confident that you want to use a given a command, for example, it can give you an intellisense like completion option. I don't think we've cracked the code on how this UX should work yet though -- as evidenced by how many people find cursor/copilot autocompletion suggestions so frustrating. The other great thing about this mode is that it can double as a teaching methodology. If I have a complicated interface that is not very discoverable, it may be hard to sell potential users on the time investment required to learn everything. Why would I want to invest hours into learning non-transferrable knowledge when I'm not even sure I want to go with this option versus a competitor? It will be a far better experience if I can first vibe-use the product , and if it's right for me, I'll probably be incented to learn the inner workings of it as I try to do more and more.
- 2y ago

spprashant 2y ago

Anyone know how to figure out the web stack for this blog? Its elegant, minimal, and has enough support for some rich elements which add to the experience.

alnwlsn 2y ago

Somebody showed me a text-to-CAD AI tool recently, and I can't help but feel that whoever made it doesn't understand that people who use CAD aren't trying to solve the problem of "make a model of a rubber duck" but something more like "make a custom angle bracket which mounts part number xxxyyyy". Sure, you can try to describe what you want in words, but there's a reason machine shops want drawings and not a 300 word poem like you're a 14th century monk. Much much easier to just draw a picture.

stevage 2y ago
Surely those text based tools exist for people who aren't CAD experts. I don't know CAD. But a tool that let me type in a description of a thing and then send it off to be 3D printed sounds pretty great to me.

sebastiennight 2y ago

The author seems to ignore the main case for conversational interfaces - which is not to replace the software, but the software user. Not telling your car to turn left or right, but telling your cab driver you're going to the airport. This is our usecase at our startup[1] - we want to enable tiny SMBs who didn't have the budget to hire a "video guy", to get an experience similar to having one. And that's why we're switching to a conversational UX (because those users would normally communicate with the "video guy" or girl by sending them a Whatsapp message, not by clicking buttons on the video software) [1] https://www.onetake.ai https://www.onetake.ai

stevage 2y ago

> “This is it! The next computing paradigm is here! We’ll only use natural language going forward!” Is anyone actually making any argument like that? The whole piece feels like a giant strawman.

paulsutter 2y ago

One-way voice is the right answer. Keep the UI, even the mouse and keyboard. But let me speak requests instead of typing literally everything

resurrected 2y ago

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karemmom 2y ago

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