I'd rather type all day than talk. But Comcast voice remote is awesome.
25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
101–110 of 296 posts
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#102privacy point in the article is legit and a concern with all kinds of AI-mediated alternative input.
it may mean that if you aren't comfortable sharing rich context about your life with a cloud platform, you'll get left behind by technology
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, to extend the GUI/console metaphor, it means that at some point soon, we'll all be using NLP because it's dramatically more user-friendly for the vast majority of people.
I understand your point, but I'm not sure that GUIs won out because they were dramatically more user-friendly. It certainly helped, but I think they won because it made multitasking possible. Multitasking from the users perspective that is, the ability to interact with more than one application at the same time. That was just not possible on a console, so even people who didn't need user friendliness were able to do…
> That was just not possible on a console,
Was it? Even if you discard stuff like tmux as already a GUI, you can still send whatever is running at the moment to the background with CTRL-Z and typing "bg" on any modern Unix system. "jobs" will then list all your processes, and "fg " will bring it to the foreground. I am sure this functionality predates most modern GUIs.
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#104A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time. Last weekend I had the following failed queries: "OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?" "OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass" "OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent I…
Which is exactly why I prefer formal query languages over NLP queries. In both cases (at least with most state of the art NLP techniques), you have to learn certain patterns and ways to phrase a query so that the system will reliably understand it. With formal query languages, these patterns are well-defined, can be looked up and will most likely not change significantly (so there is value in memorizing them). With N…
Agreed; back in the day when we/I used to play text adventures, or interact with MUDs/MOOs those systems had English-like interaction languages but the semantics of them were relatively clear -- you mostly had to follow the verb/prep/object formula and once you figured that out, you could manage the system fairly well, without running into a lot of terrible corner cases.
I'd rather have an assistant type system with a fairly well defined query system that exposed its capabilities and limitations directly, rather than me having to guess at the corner cases and failure points.
Disclaimer: I work @ Google on display assistant devices, but I don't work on the actual assistant interaction pieces.
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#105One thing I haven't seen discussed is the poor affordance / discoverability of speech technology. Google Home can do some clever things however, it also does not have the ability to do some very basic stuff. As a user, how do you know what Google Home can do and cannot do? It is just trial and error. And if Google Home introduces a new feature to be able to complete new types of queries. What now? How does a user kno…
What you say about "temporal memory" is not exactly true for Google's assistant. You can try two separate queries
1. "Who is the president of the United States?" 2. "What is his wife's name?"
And it will resolve the deictic pronoun.
I haven't tried this feature out extensively, but it has worked for a few years now.
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
But your examples are way harder than they sound. Speech or non speech analysers have a hard time with context. What do you mean by "recent" photos. And what percentage? Of people wearing mask in each photo, or of 1 or more people with a mask in the whole set of photos? Or the percentage of photo having all people wearing a mask. We humans make a lot of deduction from context. We haven't been able to teach computers…
Context is hard, but it seems like “recent” means (99% of the time) order by date descending, grab the first 15 or so, and then how many of those photos contain a person with a mask. Maybe the difficult part is whether or not you look for the 15 most recent photos containing people, or the 15 most recent photos of anything.
No, it doesn't mean that 99% of the time. It's more like 99% contextual.
If I ask for recent wildfire news and I'm in a state that doesn't experience wildfires often, are you going to return 15 news articles about wildfires spread out over the 200 year history of the state? I almost certainly want 15 news articles about the current wildfires in some other parts of the country. Your algorithm doesn't really say what to do here.
If I ask for "recent relatively rare astronomical event" recent might mean hundreds of years or more. If I ask for "recent PC game releases" it might mean a month or the current year. If I ask for "recent public events in my town" it might mean over the last week.
In many cases, "there are no recent events" is a better answer than "here are the last 15 events."
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#107I suck at talking. I speak in halting, quiet sentence fragments. My mind wanders and I lose my point. I get in my head a lot. I'm much better at writing and reading as a communication method. I'm open to speech stuff, but currently no speech recognition solution meets any needs I have.
Just my 2c, I'm sure other people have uses for it. The most interesting one (to me) has popped up a few times on HN, which is voice-based programming. I would love to see that mature and become more widespread, there are a few things that are annoying enough to do that if I had a voice shortcut or eye tracking it would be pretty cool.
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling. Well, if I had some type of personal assistant who worked for me (as in, a real human), I would just call out "Hey, Sam, please order pizza for me" and continue with whatever I was doing. The reason people don't make phone calls is they add a lot of additional friction. You have to dial the number, and wait for someone to pick up, and g…
I don't know, I like swiping through photos of food to make my decisions on what to eat, and then it only takes about 30 more seconds to complete the order at most.
This is just the optimal halting problem; sometimes you want to spend time finding the exact thing you want, and sometimes you just want something that's good enough. Both problems don't need the same solution.
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, to extend the GUI/console metaphor, it means that at some point soon, we'll all be using NLP because it's dramatically more user-friendly for the vast majority of people.
I understand your point, but I'm not sure that GUIs won out because they were dramatically more user-friendly. It certainly helped, but I think they won because it made multitasking possible. Multitasking from the users perspective that is, the ability to interact with more than one application at the same time. That was just not possible on a console, so even people who didn't need user friendliness were able to do…
Aside from the usability POV, GUI provided significantly more features to the user, such as visualization of information and data. Images, Audio, Video, Multi-Media, 3D/2D Video games. You could have more information on the screen and at your fingertips at the same time. You can load many of these things from the CLI, but it's not as convenient as within a GUI.
Re: 25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can set my own alarms, thank you. And not only that, but a specialized user interface is often preferable to voice even when the assistant passes the Turing test. There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.
It's funny, but for years I've felt like "Hey Siri, set an alarm for 7am" was 1000x easier than using the clunky Clock UI and it's almost exclusively what I use Siri for. Tasks that are so perfectly well-defined are exactly what this "smart" tech is useful for. Except that recently, Siri screwed me. I said "hey Siri, set an alarm for 6:30am" and her response was "Ok, your 6:30am alarm is on," but what she actually me…
On the google side, "wake me up at 7" results in a 7AM alarm 95% of the time and a 7 PM alarm the other 5%. Just frequent enough to screw you over…