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Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#11
Absent regulation or other incentives to nudge the market otherwise, the overwhelming majority of software is and will be written to use existing input methods--i.e. adding a new input method isn't the core competency of a team creating the world's best todo list app.

With that precondition, any voice-to-control layer on the desktop is in the tough situation of translating between voice input and a piece of software that was designed without voice input in mind.

Google and Siri, etc., aren't as beholden to the desktop/browser interface paradigm, so they don't have to perform this interface translation.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#12
>The market is huge

Apparently ... it's not

Or, rather, it's not YET "huge"

Sure - half the planet is online, but they're speaking myriad languages in more combinations of enunciation, dialect, and accent than is probably even calculable

>the Natural Language Processing of "OK Google" and Siri are quite refined at this point

Totally different to ask for today's weather and to tell a computer what to do - just like it's totally different to hit your favorite search engine and type "what is Pluto's orbit" and to write the search engine that goes off and does what you asked (and even when it does go off and do it, it still returns multiple (often conflicting) results - which leads to the whole problem of identifying authority online (something I wrote about 15+ years ago https://antipaucity.com/2006/10/23/authority-issues-online/#...))

It's also worlds different to be able to respond to variations on a theme of maybe a couple hundred search keywords (is it even that many?) and the literally unlimited number of commands people issue to their computing devices every day. Let's even say Siri is That Good™ - you've got a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad on your desk ...which one should respond when you say, "Hey, Siri"? Why that one vs this one? Do you have to start every command with the name of the device? Maybe that's not so hard at home (maybe), but get into corporate environments with naming conventions like H5GG71WLD? ... or dozens/scores/hundreds of people within listening distance of everyone's microphones getting triggered by other conversations in the room, conference calls, your cubemates' inability to attenuate their voices and aim only at their laptop when talking ...

It's a nightmare to think about - practically, let alone computationally

Most people look at the example of, say, Star Trek for voice commands to "the computer". Ever notice the computer only responds when the script demands it? Geordi shouting in Engineering commands to his team or panicked messages to the bridge are never misinterpreted by the computer as commands to it

That's mighty convenient - and not at all representative of anything resembling a reality we can create [yet]

Maybe in another few decades or centuries ... but I'd wager probably not

Another consideration: speaking is very slow compared to a click, tap, or typing a few characters at a prompt. Why would you want to intentionally make your human-to-device interactions more clumsy and error-prone?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#13
I've heard cursorless (https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless-talon) is good but have never tried it. Syntax-aware voice navigation of code, powered by tree-sitter queries!

I also have a friend who is a gifted programmer who lost his ability to type about a decade ago; he has put together an open-source software stack to help: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~dwk/

Of course this doesn't really answer your question. But it's a hard problem, and you're basically forced to become a power user to reliably interact with your PC.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#15
post #7
post #3

Speech models today can mine the entire corpus of published conversation and return the most likely response to a given statement. That's not how we converse. Every relationship you have is a little model in your brain that we call a person's "personality." Every one talks differently, has different frames of reference, uses different codes of language, different assumptions. Cutting edge speech models work perfectly…

I have massive issues with speech recognition software. It doesn't work for me in either english or spanish. Statements like "google and siri are so advanced now" feel like people are collectively pranking me. That said, I too have wondered why we don't have speech control for computers or at least appliances. You don't need to parse all language. Just a standard set of primitives like you'd find on a remote should b…

An interesting project: Automatically convert a terminal commands `--help` page to a speech model. Run that over $PATH, then you never have to type again!

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#16
For anyone interested in this topic, you might be interested in this tech talk[1] from Emily Shea. In it she demos a tech stack similar to what's mentioned here, to fairly good effect. It does appear that required a lot of tweaking on her part and is optimized for the writing of code, and I'm not sure how well it functions for more general contexts.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKuRkGkf5HU

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#17
post #14

That sounds exhausting. "Open this program" "Minimize" "Focus on this text input" ..dictate.. "switch to command mode" "save and close" i'd rather just: "click click tab type ctrl-S"

Most of these systems entail developing a shorthand. For operations you expect to do a lot you assign one-syllable commands.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#18
post #6

As far as human computer interfaces go, keyboard and mouse probably win comfortably in both bandwidth and latency against speech to text in almost all tasks. Former also requires a less physical effort and is creates less noise for others. My guess is that this shrinks the demand for good quality voice HCI significantly and those who really need it end up being overlooked.

Keyboard and mouse certainly don't beat voice for bandwidth (assuming error-free ASR, which doesn't exist today).

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#19
post #6

As far as human computer interfaces go, keyboard and mouse probably win comfortably in both bandwidth and latency against speech to text in almost all tasks. Former also requires a less physical effort and is creates less noise for others. My guess is that this shrinks the demand for good quality voice HCI significantly and those who really need it end up being overlooked.

Agreed. And it’s not just less noise, there is a privacy component to it. I don’t really feel like broadcasting what I am doing to anyone within earshot.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?

#20
post #14

That sounds exhausting. "Open this program" "Minimize" "Focus on this text input" ..dictate.. "switch to command mode" "save and close" i'd rather just: "click click tab type ctrl-S"

The post is about people who physically can't do that.
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