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Comment by zhyder | Hacker News Reader

I think we overstate how useful such a system is. Visual UIs with buttons are so predictable and efficient to use, so anytime you can reach for a screen and hand-operated-input for anything complex, you will.

I've stopped using home devices like the Echo (coz of privacy concerns, esp with hotword mistriggers): now use voice only when driving the car. Maybe multimodal LLMs like GPT-4o will spawn new useful use-cases, but I think they're unlikely to be for the same use-cases Alexa the product+brand is known for.

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Exactly - Amazon wasn't the only company gutting their conversational UI teams because they couldn't figure out how to make money with them. My guess is 99% of conversational UIs are some combination of:

1. Set my alarm/timer.

2. "What's the weather?"

3. "Turn on/off my lights" for those with connected lights.

etc.

We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days.

> We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days.

It depends what culture you’re from. Many cultures around the world prefer voice. If you live in a fair large city just look around for folks on the phone. There are still many people who need a voice plan.

It also depends greatly on the conversation you plan to have. If I'm hitting up my wife to see what she wants for dinner, that's perfect as a text - it's brief and benefits from being asynchronous. But if I want to talk about something time sensitive (perhaps I'm at the restaurant already so I need an answer now, or maybe an emergency has happened) I call. I don't think people prefer to use text most of the time so much as they use the most appropriate medium for the discussion.

I honestly really think this depends on the age/generation of the participants (or perhaps it's just personality and I'm wrongly ascribing it to generation).

I'm with you 100% (and am later Gen X FWIW). But I have some friends born late 80s who will have these drawn out, intricate, sensitive conversations for literally hours over text and all I can think is "jeezus, just call them on the damn phone!"

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