Hacker News Reader

Comment by fr0sty | Hacker News Reader

I like the premise of the article, but I feel there is an unspoken assumption made by the author that most people can touch-type or are willing to learn how.

Consider this command:

    play 10 random country then "Teenage Dream"

A proficient touch typist can rattle this off in < 10sec but a "hunt and peck" or other ad hoc typist will be essentially trading pecking at the screen with a finger on the mouse to pecking at the keyboard with the same finger.

View on HN

The larger assumption, I think, is that people will know precisely what they want to do.

How many people sit down to fire up some music and know exactly what they want to listen to?

One could trivially add a "list playlists" concept or "list country" or "browse artists" for the uninspired listener. But how many users prefer text to GUI for that sort of browsing/discovery experience?

To say nothing of the additional inefficiency generated by typing in what is now clearly going to be a total of several commands in many, if not most, cases.

I find the command line superior to the GUI for exactly one thing: firing off specific commands. As soon as you step outside of that, its advantages wane and disadvantages take over.

And it's an unfortunately-common mistake of technical users, to only consider use cases where the user knows precisely what they want to do and executes the process correctly.

Ok, but I don't think typing is the point. What if we could just say it?

Isn't it much more intuitive to say to the computer "play 10 random country" than enunciate a succession of commands / menu items?

We now take all of those menu items for granted, but really, does it make any sense to have to do "File / Open" to play a song or continue to write something we started working on earlier?

In the real world the only things I ever open are books; I would open folders if I still had any, but I certainly never open any "file" (whatever that is). We open things that contain other things that we're interested in, at a conceptual level. A file does not contain anything (bits? characters? sentences?) -- it is the thing itself.

And "save"? Why does this have to be?? In the real world if I leave a paper on my desk I expect to find it in the exact same place and state the next day; but on the computer if I don't save it I lose it. And I need to give it a name, too! All of this is crazy (one way to see how crazy it is, is to try to teach it to old people).

I think iCloud is starting to address all of this. It's about time. But new interfaces and ways to interact with the computer shouldn't be dismissed right away. This guy could be onto something.

> Isn't it much more intuitive to say to the computer "play 10 random country" than enunciate a succession of commands / menu items?

Have you ever tried to interact with one of those "natural language" telephone systems? I loath the whole experience. Discoverability is either painful (waiting for a read-through of your options) or futile (guessing blindly and not knowing whether it is your word choice or enunciation that is to blame).

> Discoverability is either painful (waiting for a read-through of your options) or futile (guessing blindly and not knowing whether it is your word choice or enunciation that is to blame).

That is due to the limitations of such voice menus being an audio only interface. There is no reason that a computer couldn't list helpful commands, modifiers (switches), and arguments on the screen as a person rambled about the kind of thing(s) they wanted to do. Given fast, context-aware speech recognition, obviously.

> I loath the whole experience

Because it doesn't really work. But what if it did?

"play 10 random country" isn't really intuitive at all. "Play a bunch of country songs" is what someone might actually say, or maybe "I wanna listen to some c&w". The computer's got to be able to understand this, which isn't likely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com