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Beachheads and Obstacles

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Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#11

Post by the_watcher »

smacktoward wrote: post #9
the_watcher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone was released in 2007, but a smartphone that could technically have called a ride predates it by at least a few years. Uber was founded in 2009, but actually release the product and app until 2011, after a beta in 2010 [0]. It didn't hit a $1B valuation until somewhere between February 2012 and August 2013 [1]. So 4 years until the emergence of the X in "smartphones led to X", 6 years until it was clear tha…

> The iPhone was released in 2007, but a smartphone that could technically have called a ride predates it by at least a few years. From a technical perspective, there's no reason you couldn't have had a ride-hailing app on a Nokia Series 60 phone in 2006, or a Palm Treo 270 in 2002. All the necessary components were present in both of them. What was missing was a critical mass of users of those devices -- a user base…

Yes, I completely agree with that. Particularly given that "voice assistant who helps you rely less on your smartphone OS" doesn't have the built in distribution advantage that phones did (pretty much everyone had accepted that they need a mobile phone), so a diverse set of form factors matters (not everyone wants glasses, some people hate watches, etc).

Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#12

Post by artfulhippo »

the_watcher wrote: post #10
artfulhippo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Oculus is the leader in consumer VR (games and porn) does little to spark confidence in Facebook as a hard product design firm. Oculus was an acquisition, and we know Facebook is good at acquiring amazing companies. But can Facebook create innovative products that people want? This is still an open question. After all, Facebook's success comes from out-executing on the ideas of others. I haven't used a Portal, b…

Oculus was acquired long enough ago to attribute the product success of pretty much all of the consumer success to Facebook's ability to ship. The Quest was designed and shipped entirely under Boz, for example. They didn't buy Oculus and simply stop working.

Facebook deserves credit for iterating on solid foundations.

If they make VR useful outside of games and porn, then they will deserve credit for meaningful innovation.

To clarify why FB cannot be satisfied with the games and porn market is that theres a big gender imbalance in those markets, and it runs against the demographics of Facebooks other apps, which have equal or even female-majority user-bases.

Given its PR and branding issues, Facebook does not want to be a games and porn company (techbro) company.

Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#13

Post by barbecue_sauce »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #4
thisisananth wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a website or an app, there are specific affordances i.e buttons, dropdowns, gps and text boxes that bound the input and steer the user input to help the user achieve the task. For the speakers like Alexa and Google Home, voice being the only input allows user to say whatever they want hence making the task space infinite. But the voice recognition and NLP is not in a place where it can recognize everything the use…

> This creates a less than stellar experience with the user having to repeat, rephrase or even worse abandon the task. Not to mention: constant wondering whether the task can even be accomplished. When a voice assistant rejects your query, in many cases you can't be sure whether it's because it couldn't understand you, or because it can't possibly accept what you said as a valid input in the context it's in. In regul…

Norman would refer to these constraints as "signifiers", indicators of possible affordances. It's interesting how weak voice assistants are at signifying what you can actually do with them.

Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#14

Post by TeMPOraL »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #13
TeMPOraL wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This creates a less than stellar experience with the user having to repeat, rephrase or even worse abandon the task. Not to mention: constant wondering whether the task can even be accomplished. When a voice assistant rejects your query, in many cases you can't be sure whether it's because it couldn't understand you, or because it can't possibly accept what you said as a valid input in the context it's in. In regul…

Norman would refer to these constraints as "signifiers", indicators of possible affordances. It's interesting how weak voice assistants are at signifying what you can actually do with them.

Thanks for introducing me to the term. Damn, I need to finally read that book.

Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#15

Post by sizzle »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #4
thisisananth wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a website or an app, there are specific affordances i.e buttons, dropdowns, gps and text boxes that bound the input and steer the user input to help the user achieve the task. For the speakers like Alexa and Google Home, voice being the only input allows user to say whatever they want hence making the task space infinite. But the voice recognition and NLP is not in a place where it can recognize everything the use…

> This creates a less than stellar experience with the user having to repeat, rephrase or even worse abandon the task. Not to mention: constant wondering whether the task can even be accomplished. When a voice assistant rejects your query, in many cases you can't be sure whether it's because it couldn't understand you, or because it can't possibly accept what you said as a valid input in the context it's in. In regul…

The dev team can add helpful responses that signify to users the available set of voice commands for tasks it can complete based on keywords it can recognize from a user utterance or simply letting them know they didn't understand their response and they can get a list of actions spoken to them by asking for help. (I've worked on published Alexa skills for several large tech companies.)

I think a cool immersive middle ground will be smart surfaces embedded in wall materials that can display things and will simply list out all actions available or anthropomorphize the smart assistant as like a virtual servant that follows you around serving up facts and doing monotonous IoT actions for you.

Now the privacy and surveillance implications of something like this is another story...

Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#16

Post by [deleted] »

smacktoward wrote: post #9
the_watcher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone was released in 2007, but a smartphone that could technically have called a ride predates it by at least a few years. Uber was founded in 2009, but actually release the product and app until 2011, after a beta in 2010 [0]. It didn't hit a $1B valuation until somewhere between February 2012 and August 2013 [1]. So 4 years until the emergence of the X in "smartphones led to X", 6 years until it was clear tha…

> The iPhone was released in 2007, but a smartphone that could technically have called a ride predates it by at least a few years. From a technical perspective, there's no reason you couldn't have had a ride-hailing app on a Nokia Series 60 phone in 2006, or a Palm Treo 270 in 2002. All the necessary components were present in both of them. What was missing was a critical mass of users of those devices -- a user base…

[deleted]

Re: Beachheads and Obstacles

#17

Post by TeMPOraL »

sizzle wrote: post #15
TeMPOraL wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This creates a less than stellar experience with the user having to repeat, rephrase or even worse abandon the task. Not to mention: constant wondering whether the task can even be accomplished. When a voice assistant rejects your query, in many cases you can't be sure whether it's because it couldn't understand you, or because it can't possibly accept what you said as a valid input in the context it's in. In regul…

The dev team can add helpful responses that signify to users the available set of voice commands for tasks it can complete based on keywords it can recognize from a user utterance or simply letting them know they didn't understand their response and they can get a list of actions spoken to them by asking for help. (I've worked on published Alexa skills for several large tech companies.) I think a cool immersive middl…

> Now the privacy and surveillance implications of something like this is another story...

Those would be resolved here and elsewhere if the industry could be made to stop trying to own people's data. It's not the data that should be a commodity, it's software and clouds.

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