Voice UI Is the Future. But When?
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
There will always need to be a second screen- or keyboard-based UI. That doesn't mean voice won't be hugely important, but it does mean it'll never be the whole story. Consequently, I don't see it being 'the future' of UIs.
At work, we isolate the frequent-phoners from those who have to concentrate for prolonged periods of time. If more poeple start talking at work, the distractions are going to get worse.
In a home, I do totally get it. If it wasn't for the always listening microphones, I'd be up for it. But even then... I might ask my house to do something, I'm still going to manually want to type this comment.
Voice recognition when I’m out and about don’t want to get my phone out it’s for the best use for it for me but as this text shows voice recognition isn’t very good you had even indoors
This would eliminate the bandwidth and privacy issues a voice UI has while allowing to keep the hands on the keyboard for working the cli.
My point is that there are a lot of really good use cases for Voice or Type commands, but a lot of them are really inconsistent or unpolished, I love how I can say "Play HipHop" and magically it will look for my Spotify's HipHop playlist and play it, but it's unpolished because it'll play the songs in a different order than how it would be played by opening the playlist manually, and it's inconsistent because if I ask the same command in the search bar it will look on google's "Play Music" instead of Spotify. It feels like they are working really hard in the backend, but too little in the frontend (if we can call it like that).
If you really want this to work, we can install infrastructure at public places that can cooperate with your personal devices to improve your experience dramatically.
Think directional microphones and user tracking cameras that listens to you and watch your surroundings for you.
That way, you can have actual assistant as the infrastructure can be very knowledgable about the environment that's installed. For example, it can know how full the trains in the tube are and direct you to the optimal door, it an know the exact exit, it can know the wending machine and what it offers.
Suddenly, you will have voice UI to an intelligent assistant. Probably will feel as if it is a general purpose AI since it will be specialised for every location and occasion.
Maybe it can works as a subscription service where you gain advantage in crowded places against those who don't have a subscription or maybe it can be a public service and optimize the crowds movements and actions to improve productivity. Either model sounds dystopian but I would argue this is the direction we are headed to.
It would be interesting if someone could come up with a list of interface challenges that voice could solve best.
One that I would like to have is a writing platform/software that is entirely functional with voice. Something of a similar nature: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Quick-Quotes_Quill
IDK what the eventual VUIs look like, but I have a feeling were still at the discovery phase. Even operating GPS/calls/music via voice while driving is still awkward. In a car you have privacy, quite and a need to keep hands and eyes free. It should be the ideal environment for VUI.
Personally, I'm curious to see more voice used as an additional input to existing UIs, the way mouse, keyboard & touch are currently used simultaneously.
I can’t just ask it what the last couple episodes of a podcast are, have it tell me, and say OK play the second one. Or transparently even handle nav without fiddling.
Voice recognition has gotten decent—though it’s better with Alexa’s directional microphones. NLP and taking associated actions is still pretty bad.
Voice recognition and very simple NLP have gotten good pretty fast, and is still improving fast. That's necessary but not sufficient for a good UI.
The interaction model just isn't good enough yet. We probably need a podcatcher app to be built for voice-first, in order to discover the right UI.
Also, make it available offline. I don't want $bigdata to know everything I do on my computer. Amazon Echo & friends are way too orwellian for my taste. I don't know if the general public will care about that however.
A tangential question. What steps can an organisation take to assuage your worries about your data being mis-used?
"Fire and forget" commands are great. "Hey alexa, set an alarm for 8am". Once you trust alexa to do these tasks you don't need any feedback.
But tasks where you need constant feedback are not well suited to voice UI. If you accidentally blast music through your hi-fi asking alexa to "turn it down a bit" 4 times and then "turn it up" finally to get to a nice listening volume takes much much longer than turning a dial while listening to the auditory feedback you get.
What I think is really the killer feature of speech recognition is its role as an input. Anecdotally, I find the only times I use any voice UI is for setting alarms (because iOS's time input makes you scroll thru every minute) and asking a sufficiently long question to Google (because touchscreen keyboards are still imprecise and I've got fat fingers). Even though both Android and iOS have speech recognition built into their keyboards I think there's something someone is missing on the input side.
Furthermore, moving eyes is way faster than any kind of navigation input, even voice. That's why displays contain way more information than what people are able to process at any given moment.
And then there's this old principle of GUIs: making choices visible. Screen can list all available options. Voice UI cannot. Even command-line UIs support tab-complete for this reason.
If I were to be very cynical, I would say that voice UIs shine when people are illiterate enough to avoid typing and reading. A less cynical answer is that voice UI fits where big screen doesn't.
Even for long form text entry it's tiresome (ever tried speaking for 1 hour?) -- never mind the noise (e.g. in an office), privacy issues, discoverability of options, and all that.
Because most of my days when I am tired, the last thing i want to do is to open my month.
No it isn't.
There should be a keyboard with integrated voice recognition, and a "voice assist" button.
Remove any superfluous keys (anything you might have to look down for) and just keep the typewriter keys.
and add a voico-correct to operating systems, not "auto". you mistype and you can dictate the correct word for it to fix for you.
once we have this paradigm the os will evolve for it.
I think FULL voice has privacy issues, and annoyance too. I want to quietly instruct my pc, not talk to it all day (and I don't want to have to hear someone else do that either)
I have yet to see a classic gui with a decent NN- which learns your default behaviour in every step, applying those by ctrl+left-click.
Consider: Legal documents initially began as natural language evaluated by very effective natural language processors (other people). Over time, as the edge cases and ambiguities built up, the language of law diverged to the point that legalese is hardly considered "natural" today.
Considering that even high-IQ native English speakers have huge, huge problems "just doing what you want", even after explicit and unambiguous instructions -- don't hold your breath. (Maybe after the flying moon car.)
Natural language has a low signal to noise ratio compared to explicit verbs and keywords.
Git just has less than stellar usability when it comes to performing common actions. Most of that probably is intentional because on the other hand it affords you a great deal of flexibility. If you want to improve the usability of Git standard UI patterns like providing better keywords and shortcuts to frequently used features will suffice. It's just a matter of the design philosophy behind the tool.