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The case against conversational interfaces

julian.digital

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Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#31

Post by incognito124 »

cdrini wrote: post #17

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/…

> 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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#32

Post by szszrk »

pugio wrote: post #16

> 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 The number of times in the last few years I've wanted th…

Oh wow. That video is 12 years old. Early in the presentation Travis reveals he used Dragon back then.

Do you recall Swype keyboard for Android? The one that popularized swyping to write on touch screens? It had Dragon at some point.

IT WAS AMAZING.

Around 12-14 years ago (Android 2.3? Maybe 3?) I was able to easily dictate full long text messages and emails, in my native tongue, including punctuation and occasional slang or even word formation. I could dictate a decent long paragraph of text on the first try and not have to fix a single character.

It's 2025 and the closest I can find is a dictation app on my newest phone that uses online AI service, yet it's still not that great when it comes to punctuation and requires me to spit the whole paragraph at once, without taking a breath.

Is there anything equally effective for any of you nowadays? That actually works across the whole device?

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#33

Post by ChuckMcM »

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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#34

Post by Peteragain »

"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 ..

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#35

Post by ithkuil »

neom wrote: post #23
Foobar8568 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, packed of pseudosciences, which we still suffer today. In Switzerland, we get often measle outbreaks thanks to his cult.

Well, how folks view the philosophy can be multifaceted, so I'll leave the pseudoscience and cult part aside. On the measles, Steiner was certainly skeptical of vaccination, but I think in Switzerland you have a cultural issue with vaccination. The Waldorf school I went to in Canada, everyone had a measles vaccine, but I do recall a Swiss student coming to our distinctively not Waldorf high school and there being a h…

When societies get advanced enough that all the basic needs are covered, a new generation arises where people think we can go back to a simpler past and ditch all that ugly gray industrial scientific technocratic globalistic etc etc ( add more scary qualifiers ) things that are perceived to be the the reason why things are bad and never ever concede that these things play an important role in enabling the safe environment where those very thoughts can be entertained.

The hedonic treadmill is driving the world

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#37

Post by perlgeek »

> 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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#38

Post by benob »

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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#39

Post by break_the_bank »

shameless plug here but we have been building in a similar space. We call it 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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#40

Post by nitwit005 »

> 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.

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