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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, the talking computer HAL was introduced in the same year as English's mouse. (Though the Star Trek oral computer beat this by a couple years.) Of the various human-computer interfaces- keyboard, graphical, oral- I suspect oral will dominate shortly. Oral is most natural, but required some A.I. to work well.

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I think that oral control will only really take off once we can record it sub vocally, in the style of "speaker for the dead" ("ender's game" sequel).

I like the flexibility, but I really really don't like people to hear what I'm saying. Imagine three people in a room trying to do this. It'd be total nonsense. Subvocal commands would be really nice, if that's a thing that is actually possible.

Or maybe constant chattering from everyone around you becomes the new normal. I can totally imagine old me (38 now) being completely overwhelmed by this technology and all my grandkids wondering why I'm having such a hard time, and rolling their eyes when I say I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit! Everything was simpler back then! I didn't have to listen to all this yabbering all the time and I could just tell the dang computer what I want it to dang darn do!

>I can totally imagine old me (38 now) > I just want a mouse and keyboard, dammit!

About the same age, and I feel this way about mobile devices/touchscreens already!

I’m pretty annoyed by the inscrutability of some new UIs, their total lack of interactive cues and discoverability. It makes me feel old and most importantly it reminds me that often if not always, it’s not the potential utility that motivated my interest in applications, but a primal curiosity to tinker. The reward comes fryom just fidgeting with the widget and nothing more. Essentially a form of procrastination.

About half this age, and I feel the same way already.

I can't stand touchscreens for anything other then placing calls, and maybe controlling music playback. Anything more complicated I miss dedicated hardware for input.

I wonder if sub-vocal will happen anytime soon, and if it does, I am still not sure how it will solve voice being sub-optimal for some types of text. One example is plain old programming, and needs a fairly elaborate setup. The best example I've been able to find was Tavis Rudd's presentation [1], which seems to be a decent solution.

I have tried to more or less replicate this setup, but found it less satisfactory. Aside from it demanding near-perfect audio quality to work remotely well in general (as well as a heavy time investment, initial and ongoing), you frequently run into edge cases where it just doesn't want to understand something you're saying. After the 5th or 6th mis-transcription of some specific phrase, you tend to just give up and reach for the keyboard, RSI be damned. (And this as a native English-speaker, with a relatively neutral accent.)

I can definitely imagine better fleshed out solutions to either voice recognition for programming, or programming languages whose syntax lends themselves to easier and more productive voice recognition. I could see some definite productivity enhancements if it were achieved.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

One upside of AR is sensor fusion, so components can be individually less robust. Those contending (mis)transcriptions might be selected among by an eye-tracked glance, rather than reaching for a keyboard, or even an "eep alt 3".

Regarding sup-optimality...

Currently our programming is optimized for keyboard input. If sub-vocal instruction becomes "a thing", I suspect we would spend some collective effort to create a programming language optimized for that mode of input.

I think the only reason we don't have real languages using touch input is because of the lack of bandwidth for that signal.

I remember when I was in middle school reading a YA novel about VR (I think one of the Net Force books), the main character discovered a hacker and expressed disbelief that he was "entering commands with a keyboard!". I was like, "Wow, like on DOS? Why not use a mouse? What is this, the 80s?"

Ironic now, that probably 50% of my interactions with computers are via command line.

Maybe I'm old but if I'm composing text, I far prefer to type on a keyboard than dictate. I spend far more time re-reading and revising what I've written than I do typing it, and unless I were willing to significantly drop my standards of written communication I can't see myself gaining all that much from switching to voice control.

Plus, talking all day is exhausting. Why would you want to do that?

The concept of a talking computer and mouse of course met in 1986's Star Trek IV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE

I don't think so, and Scott Adams has his doubts too: https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-24

Alexa is taking over the game, even with the not-quite-natural syntax and privacy concerns. That said, speech is laborious compared to thought. Elon Musk is working on thought (for real).

The ambiguity of human language is one of the hardest problems in IT.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

To this day, I am creeped out by how often I use HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers).

Was that acronym in common use at the time that the book was written? How about the movie? Which way does that causation go, if it exists at all?

Sorry for the off-topic question, but it really does haunt me. Modern HALs are like rat nests, and I imagine it was worse in decades past. So it must be a pun...right?

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