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Comment by snypher | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen a young person have 100% success with a voice assistant, let alone a 91yo? Not a chance I'm sending Granny with whatever my phone thinks 'taxi' is.

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Is 100% success your level of success? I think a nice font that assists users with low vision level is an excellent idea which I said and I thought the font was very well designed.

What happens when your vision is too poor to read even the best designed font?

At that point 100% success is an unrealistic level and so a discussion about how smart assistants work or even other assistive functionality is a fair discussion and one the author did not mention at all.

> Is 100% success your level of success?

Yes. Yes, it is.

For some reason we're sold on the idea of "good enough" for things that are actually "just barely usable under perfect conditions". And this doesn't apply only to voice assistants.

And, like, 100% success or very close to it is fairly standard across the line–if you flip a light switch the light turns on, if you turn a door handle the door opens. When you give someone something complicated and novel and it doesn't even do the thing you say it should do consistently that just tanks confidence in being able to use the thing.

I think failing to some extent is fine, if the feedback is good and the device returns to a clean state. Even on a phone with buttons, she sometimes fat-fingers the wrong button super close to the phone-book-down key and ends up in the main menu, scrolls down 10x, then tries to hit the dial button for e.g. display settings. Phone appears broken because it just doesn't dial, and neither resets itself for invalid input so she could start over. She has no mental map of the various other states the phone might be in, and in confusion forgets that the hang-up button also returns to the home screen. Things are less than ideal.

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