Hacker News Reader

Comment by skj | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com