211–220 of 223 posts
If we manage that, my plans for a pure XML based shell might not be too futuristic '' ...
Only when you live alone might you be comfortable constantly speaking with your devices. Only if your life if perfectly predefined can you let your fridge order the same food that just gone stale or has been eaten. And only when you are young and healthy and not in any way differing from the "standard" would you be capable of working like these "researchers" imagine you to.
I'm not that person. I'm constantly failing at doing "triple-finger-taps" whenever I'm in need of one. I have a smartwatch with pedestrian navigation and never bothered to remember which vibration pattern means which turn. I don't configure different vibration patterns for different callers on the phone. I have a folding phone, but I almost never do side-by-side windows and when I do, I need to find out how to do that first -- and then how to leave that mode without losing my mind. I almost never use AI features on my phone not because I don't want to, but because I never remember how to activate them. I don't re-configure my gadgets to "fit my mood". I hate recommendations like "you like X, here's Y, it's the same!" I hate that I can't rest my mouse cursor on websites anymore without selecting something actionable, moving, animating or autoplaying.
All of the examples on the linked page are workflows I would never do this way. I won't be talking to my shopping list to double the ingredients. I won't be drawing gestures with my mouse on a document to activate a voice command. I won't use voice commands in general because as it turns out, I'm not capable of bringing out a complete coherent sentence without pausing and/or changing my mind and/or realizing I'm wrong once.
I appreciate those demos for the progress they are showing. It's impressive and astonishing to see restaurants getting extracted from videos or pictures getting expanded or text edited better than I ever could. It's all modern-day magic in a way. One thing it all isn't is a product. We don't have those anymore -- all we get are gimmicks. We don't do common interfaces anymore either, we are separating people in Google/Apple/Xiaomi camps.
And most importantly we don't use that technology for good except for a bunch of people writing e-mails all day, doing shopping lists and booking one of top restaurants in Tokyo for the same evening on a whim. We are long overdue for a remake of "American Psycho", but this time it will be a documentary instead of a satire.
My first impression coming away from this is skepticism. Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer". So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the ti…
The killer app was conceived as early as the 1980s: an agent running on your computer, organizing your files, your schedule, your messages, your bills, bank accounts, etc. All the parts of your life that were routine drudgery should be able to be offloaded to a smart agent, based on your preference, to bring you the information you needed with natural language queries, contextualized to what you were doing at the tim…
The hard reality is that you are still responsible for all of these things. If anything goes wrong at all, you are liable. Might not be devastating if it's just your shopping list or your photos mangled, but with taxes or bills? Even if the agent is running completely locally in your home, you still won't trust it fully if your livelihood depended on it.
The killer app is only possible if software is fully reliable, which we all know is not the case. Software is just that: software, it still has bugs, undefined behaviour etc. Agents are the same, they just break in different way and fixing them might be even more difficult.
Bottom line: you will always be liable for things happening in your name and we've been sold a fairy tale a very long time ago.
My first impression coming away from this is skepticism. Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer". So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the ti…
What if I am going on vacation next week? What if I need extra milk for a dinner I am planning? What if my kid puts the milk in the fridge sideways and it no longer detects it?
"Easy fixes" to easy problems never work because they add mental load to tasks we already manage capably. Yes we no longer have to think about buying milk when it gets low, which was a stable pattern. But we replace it with a nondeterministic "milk state" that we need to be constantly vigilant about and manually adjust any time our routines are altered - exactly when we don't want to stack on more overhead.
AI is discretely useful, tremendously so, but big tech loves to default to umbrella solutions before there is a rich context to reasonably support it. The real world is messy.
General AI product tip: show your tool fixing a messy problem not a happy path problem. That's where AI is impactful!
My first impression coming away from this is skepticism. Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer". So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the ti…
Yeah, I'd hate to use this in an open-plan office (which is like 99% of offices these days) and even using it alone at home would feel awkward. I don't really want to talk to the computer despite what 1950's sci-fi books led us to believe. It's a cool idea for the future when we have reliable EEG headsets or Neuralink or whatever though.
I'll talk to a computer, even in an office setting, if it adds enough value. But it's got to be a lot of value. Handsfree while driving is great, Iron Man talking to Jarvis while he's flying around makes sense. Many of us here are developers, engineers, or scientists, and our work has already been co-optimized with mouse and keyboard and whatever software we're in.
But when the software is less well-developed, or when it's not just dealing with technical data dumps, I imagine that a voice interface might be more useful.
So I think this idea has legs. But a successful implementation might also well be decades out.
My first impression coming away from this is skepticism. Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer". So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the ti…
Right-click menus can get cumbersome. I've seen a lot of software that suffers from function bloat - not that the functions don't work, or don't play well together, but that the user interface becomes too overwhelming for users as the number of available actions explodes. This is particularly tough for new users.
This is where voice controls could shine: as we interact with computers in more and more complex ways, we need a way to specify our desires simply and easily. And if we can't do so easily, the software has to remain simple to be usable.
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>Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you. Reads like the argument against cell phones where don't have a cabinet around you...
I wouldn't sit in the office talking on my phone next to my colleagues, that would be really annoying. I'd go and find a small meeting room or conference call booth in the office and take it there. Essentially, a cabinet.
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It seems that if we ultimately want to "move at the speed of thought," it will require speech.
There's the adage that writing is thinking, but even more accurately at least for me, editing is thinking. Neither typing speed nor dictation speed is a true bottleneck, but editing speech seems like it'd be harder than editing text. Though there may be some hybrid approach that can work well.
You don't have to think about the design of your app. You just say what you want and the AI makes it appear. If you don't like something, you tell the AI to change it. You iterate live until you get the final result you want.
This is what writing docs has become for me. I have the agent make a draft, then tell it which sections to rewrite, combine, etc. I tell it the ideas I forgot to include. I manually make certain word choice changes. The question is how do you extend this flow to non-pure-text scenarios. For most people, just talking about what you see if probably the easiest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems that if we ultimately want to "move at the speed of thought," it will require speech.
> It seems that if we ultimately want to "move at the speed of thought," it will require speech. Except for the large majority of people who read, type, and click way faster than they can talk. Especially for visual things it’s way faster to drag a rectangle than to describe what you want. A lot of us also aren’t linear verbal thinkers. It would take minutes to hours to verbalize concepts we can grasp visually/schema…
Also, I doubt DeepMind is designing for existing programmers and savvy computer users. They are thinking about the other billions of people in the world. Speech is the skill people will already have, not typing.
Imagine trying to convince someone in the 90s that that's a step forward.