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The case against conversational interfaces

julian.digital

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Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#131

Post by jeremyjh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

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…

There was an episode where Beverly Crusher was alone on the ship, and controlled everything just by talking to the computer. I wondered why there is a bridge, much less a bridge crew. But yes it makes sense to use higher bandwidth control systems when possible.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#132

Post by johnnyanmac »

throwaway290 wrote: post #128
PeterStuer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do understand that in bad cases it can be very frustrating as an engineer to chase vague statements only to be told later 'nah, that was not what I meant'. This is especially true when the gap in both directions is very large or there is incompetence and/or even adversarial stances between the parties. Language and communication only work if both parties are willing to understand. Unfortunately if either is the cas…

> What I've also seen more than once is years of formalized specs and requirements work while nothing ever gets produced, and the project is aborted before even the first line of code hit test. It just shows that no one really understood what they wanted. It is crazy to expect somebody to understand something better than you and it is hilarious to want a conversational UI to understand something better than you.

The US having this culture of blame and deflect doesn't help either. When you're more concerned about making sure you can't be held liable if X fails, then you spend more time covering your tracks than developing the project. And that's how the beauracracy creeps in.

And approach of shared responsibility in all respects (successes and failure) would accelerate past the inevitable shortcomings that occur and let all parties focus on recovering and delivering.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#133

Post by johnnyanmac »

jeremyjh wrote: post #131
TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

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…

There was an episode where Beverly Crusher was alone on the ship, and controlled everything just by talking to the computer. I wondered why there is a bridge, much less a bridge crew. But yes it makes sense to use higher bandwidth control systems when possible.

Star trek's crews overall are chosen in a way that seems to consider redundancies, as well as meshing as a team that can offer varying viewpoints.

It runs directly counter to that more capitalistic mindset of "why don't we do more with less?" when spending years navigating all kinds of unknown situations, you want as many options as possible available.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#134

Post by johnnyanmac »

android521 wrote: post #43

>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

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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#135

Post by furyofantares »

walthamstow wrote: post #125
furyofantares wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The diagram you're replying to agrees with this.

Does it? The way I'm reading it, the first step is LLM turning human imprecise thinking into specific and exact commands

That's true, but that is the input section of the diagram, not the output section where [specific and exact output] is labeled, so I believe there was legitimate confusion I was responding to.

To your point, which I think is separate but related, that IS a case where LLMs are good at producing specific and exact commands. The models + the right prompt are pretty reliable at tool calling by themselves, because you give them a list of specific and exact things they can do. And they can be fully specific and exact at inference time with constrained output (although you may still wish it called a different tool.)

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#136

Post by discreteevent »

throwaway290 wrote: post #128
PeterStuer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do understand that in bad cases it can be very frustrating as an engineer to chase vague statements only to be told later 'nah, that was not what I meant'. This is especially true when the gap in both directions is very large or there is incompetence and/or even adversarial stances between the parties. Language and communication only work if both parties are willing to understand. Unfortunately if either is the cas…

> What I've also seen more than once is years of formalized specs and requirements work while nothing ever gets produced, and the project is aborted before even the first line of code hit test. It just shows that no one really understood what they wanted. It is crazy to expect somebody to understand something better than you and it is hilarious to want a conversational UI to understand something better than you.

> it is hilarious to want a conversational UI to understand something better than you.

This is true. But what if you swap "conversational UI" with something actually intelligent like a developer. Then we see this kind of thing all the time: A user has tacit, unconscious knowledge of some domain. The developer keeps asking them questions in order to get a formal understanding of the domain. At the end the developer has a formal understanding and the user keeps their tacit understanding. In theory we could do the same with an AI - If the AI was actually intelligent.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#137

Post by sevensor »

whatnow37373 wrote: post #94

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 visceral…

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.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#138

Post by PeterStuer »

throwaway290 wrote: post #128
PeterStuer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do understand that in bad cases it can be very frustrating as an engineer to chase vague statements only to be told later 'nah, that was not what I meant'. This is especially true when the gap in both directions is very large or there is incompetence and/or even adversarial stances between the parties. Language and communication only work if both parties are willing to understand. Unfortunately if either is the cas…

> What I've also seen more than once is years of formalized specs and requirements work while nothing ever gets produced, and the project is aborted before even the first line of code hit test. It just shows that no one really understood what they wanted. It is crazy to expect somebody to understand something better than you and it is hilarious to want a conversational UI to understand something better than you.

"It just shows that no one really understood what they wanted."

Then what were the literally room full of formal process and spec documents, meeting reports and formal agreements (near 100.000 pages) by the analysts on either side for? And how did those not 'solve' the understanding problem?

When I go to the garage to have my car serviced, I expect them to understand it way better than I do. When I go to a nice restaurant I expect the cooks to prepare me dishes that taste greater than me writing them out a step-by-step recipe for them to follow. If I hire a senior consultant in even my own domain, I expect them to not just know my niche, but bring tacit knowledge from having worked on these types of solutions across my industry.

Expecting somebody to understand something better than me is exactly the reason why I hire senior people in the first place.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#139

Post by ben_w »

jeremyjh wrote: post #131
TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

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…

There was an episode where Beverly Crusher was alone on the ship, and controlled everything just by talking to the computer. I wondered why there is a bridge, much less a bridge crew. But yes it makes sense to use higher bandwidth control systems when possible.

If that was the episode where the crew disappeared with nobody else but her noticing, it doesn't really count because she was trapped in a Negative Space Wedgie pocket dimension based on her own thoughts at the time she was trapped.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#140

Post by indigoabstract »

shubhamjain wrote: post #55
ChuckMcM wrote: post #33

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…

I had the same thoughts on conversational interfaces [1]. Humane AI failed not only because of terrible execution, the whole assumption of voice being a superior interface (and trying to invent something beyond smartphones) was flawed. > Theoretically, saying, “order an Uber to airport” seems like the easiest way to accomplish the task. But is it? What kind of Uber? UberXL, UberGo? There’s a 1.5x surge pricing. Accep…

And then there is the fact that voice isn't the dominant mode of expression for all people. Some are predominantly visual thinkers, some are analytic and slow to decide, while some prefer to use their hands and so on.

I guess there's just no substitute for someone actually doing the work of figuring out the most appropriate HMI for a given task or situation, be it voice controls, touch screens, physical buttons or something else.

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