Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The case against conversational interfaces

julian.digital

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–225 of 225 posts

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#221

Post by throwaway290 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #130
Hauthorn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you work in different domains. Expecting a good outcome is different from expecting to get exactly what you intended. Formal specifications are useful in some lines of work and for some projects, less so for others. Wicked problems would be one example where formal specs are impossible by definition.

>Anyway, the disabled are pretty much always allowed to be collateral damage by society, so this will just be senseless pain. For games, you don't really need nor desire formal specs. But it also can really show how sometimes a director has a low tolerance for interpretation despite their communication being very loose. This leads to situations where it feels like the director is shifting designs on a dome, which is…

> For games, you don't really need nor desire formal specs.

Whoah is this wrong. Maybe when you hear "formal specs" you have something specific in your mind...

Formal spec can mean almost literally anything better than natural language vibes in a "few words about a desire", which is what I replied to because I was triggered by it

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#222

Post by soco »

littlestymaar wrote: post #216
soco wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then we're back to point one: retelling the whole stack of choices every time because nobody on the other side of the conversation, person or AI; can tell whether all my previous options are still valid. Because even I, the caller, might not remember what "defaults" I set in the previous call. So yeah, this argument in favor of conversational interfaces sounds at this point more like ideology than logic.

> every time because nobody on the other side of the conversation, person or AI; can tell whether all my previous options are still valid. But you can, so as long as the interlocutor tells you what assumptions it made, you can correct it if it doesn't match your current mood. > So yeah, this argument in favor of conversational interfaces sounds at this point more like ideology than logic. There's no ideology behind t…

Okay I think I finally get your point, and I even agree. The comparison with an executive assistant doesn't help much here, because the CEO interacts with only one person over all those delegatable activities, and the expectations are that person already knows all the defaults. That's what makes it smooth. This doesn't scale when you must deal with a different AI for each interaction. Will we get to a (scary maybe) point where Siri/Alexa/whoever can actually be that personal assistant? Maybe, but we're still far from it. So at least for today, the conversational interface is an extra burden. And tomorrow, we'll see.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#223

Post by mplanchard »

WhyIsItAlwaysHN wrote: post #29
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…

I worked like that for a year in uni because of RSI and it's very easy to get voice strain if you use your voice for coding like that. Many short commands is very tiring for the voice. It's also hard to dictate code without a lot of these commands because it's very dense in information. I hope something else will be the solution. Maybe LLMs being smart enough to guess the code out of a very short description and then…

Would be nice to be able to do something like write a function signature and then just say “fill out this function,” with it having the implicit needed context, as though it had been pairing with you all along and is just taking the wheel for a second. Or when you’ve finished writing a function, “test this function with some happy path inputs.” I feel like I’d appreciate that kind of use, which could integrate decently into the flow state I get into when programming. The current suite of tools for me often feels too clunky, with the need to explicitly manage context and queries: it takes me out of my flow state and feels slower than just doing it myself.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#225

Post by pydry »

ryandrake wrote: post #192
brookst wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s less common now that car controls have somewhat standardized, but I’m old enough that I remember when rental cars were a pain because it would start raining and you couldn’t find the windshield wipers. Conversational interfaces are great for rarely used features or when the user doesn’t know how to do something. For repetitive, common tasks they’re terrible. But nobody is using ChatGPT for repetitive tasks. In f…

> It’s less common now that car controls have somewhat standardized, but I’m old enough that I remember when rental cars were a pain because it would start raining and you couldn’t find the windshield wipers. This is a problem of standardization across manufacturers, not something inherent in physical controls. I never have a problem using the steering wheel in a rental car because they're all the same. You'd have th…

That's kinda the point. Previously they couldnt but with an LLM driven conversational interface they wouldnt have to standardize - all of those phrases would turn on the wipers.
Post reply on HN