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The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. Looking at screens to get key information distracts me from my surrounding

The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. Looking at screens to get key information distracts me from my surroundings and seems archaic. My wife is a sound designer who has opened my eyes to the importance of sounds both in film and in the world. It's not that I was unaware of sounds, but I didn't realize how important they are to centering me in this world and the made up worlds of films and games. Try watching a scary movie with the sound turned off, it turns into a comedy. I think its unexplored territory that has huge potential to impact the way we interact with the real world, even more so then Glass or Hololens. When I listen to music as I walk down the street I change, my mood, my posture and the way I look at the world. The music augments the reality around me in a way that visual UX never can because it's a lens between my eyes and the world.

ghaff 11y ago
The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated. The Echo has pretty solid voice recognition--far better than anything else I've ever used--but it's still hard to get it to do anything useful once you get beyond a pretty narrow script. (e.g. what's the weather forecast, play this artist, etc.)
- hoorayimhelping 11y ago
  >The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated I've done a fair bit of interface engineering for the web. Between that and using so much software over the course of my life, I'd say that this applies to GUIs just as much as voice interfaces.
  - jerf 11y ago
    Yes, but GUIs have two or three dimensions available (up/down, left/right, time) whereas voice just has the one (time). We humans can also full-duplex GUIs much more easily than voice-based interface. And GUIs at least can be hooked up to full-powered grammar-based interfaces whereas voice, somewhat ironically considering the nature of human communication, has more trouble with it. (I'd suggest this is actually a combination of the still-non-trivial nature of NLP, combined with a lack of feedback, combined with the fact that giving instructions is quite hard. Humans overestimate human language's ability to communicate clear directions, as anyone who has done tech support over a phone understands.)
    - hammock 11y ago
      Just as the mouse input has evolved to include multitouch and 3d touch gestures, voice input can also evolve. The full range of tone, inflection, pitch, etc is available from the human voice. I wonder if NLP research should have started as our ancestors did, with grunts and hoots and cries. Instead it's focused on recognizing full words and sentences while almost completely ignoring inflection. Another dimension to add with vocal input is directional. If you have mics in all corners of a room, which direction you speak in can affect whether "turn off" operates your TV, your lights or your oven.
      - freehunter 11y ago
        Very good points. I can't wait until devices can read my emotions or inflections in my voice. I can voice-to-text most of my short messages, but anything that requires punctuation or god forbid emojis still require manual input. And I don't want to have to say "period" or "exclamation mark" to indicate my desired punctuation. If I say it unusually loudly, insert an exclamation mark. If I pause at the end of a sentence (Word has known a grammatically correct sentence for decades) and don't say "um" or "uh", put a period. If my inflection goes up or there is a question word in the sentence, add a question mark. There is a lot of improvement for voice processing in several dimensions of voice.
    - krinchan 11y ago
      And copy and paste. People seem to always forget the power of it. It's the GUI equivalent of "Search for that on Google" or "Now, SSH to this IP I found digging through AWS." Copy and pasting of text from application to application is the clunky Unix Pipe. It's universal and deeply important. Taking sections of the last response, or hell, even having every response essentially be wrapped up in some sort of object you can reference in your next query to the interface is what all of these lack. Even Androids "Search this artist" doesn't quite get there. The lack of context between queries is what murders Siri for me. That and her seemingly random selection of what goes to Google and what goes to Wolphram Alpha. Sometimes even the "wolfram" verb prepended to a query just doesn't go to wolfram no matter what.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    Sure, but the difference is that it's (almost) always obvious what actions are possible in a GUI. With voice interfaces you're back to trial-and-error.
  - hrktb 11y ago
    There is still a fundamental problem with voice: it has to understand your words. A text field in contrast doesn't need any intelligence, nor do buttons. This is in particular important for instance for people living in non english speaking countries but using english in specific contexts (work, gaming, minor hobbies etc.). Switching language in audio applications are generally a PITA. Then even when you do the switch between languages every time, the engines are still have huge performance gaps between the languages. Sofware has become way extremely tolerant for multiple languages IMO. Voice recognition interfaces are not so mature yet in my experience.
- NDizzle 11y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. Check this out. One of the toughest fights in one of the toughest games performed with only voice commands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2a2dLdZ0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2a2dLdZ0M Now, granted, this is a specific use case, but, you know... "explore the space" and all that. (more cowbell!)
  - ghaff 11y ago
    That's the thing. It is a use case with voice commands that map to specific actions. In the case of music, I can give Echo the name of a specific artist or maybe a playlist. But it breaks down pretty quickly if I tell it to play "some good 60s rock."
  - rrrx3 11y ago
    The "play some good 60s rock" example isn't a VUI breakdown, it's a functionality gap in the backend. One that will probably be fixed pretty quickly, given the way things are headed. A VUI breakdown would be inability to understand accents, or non-responsiveness to commands. As a user input, Alexa is pretty well buttoned up.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      You're thinking too much like an engineer :-) It's not a speech recognition breakdown but it's certainly a voice interface breakdown in the sense of I can't get the device to do what I want it to do. As a user, I don't care where in the pipeline my attempts to communicate a desired action break down. I just know that they do.
      - gffrd 11y ago
        Exactly. We're used to dealing with either humans, who are intuitive and highly adaptive, and technology, which we manipulate and have total control over (so long as the system displays its status, we can find our way). We're not used to systems that expect us to interact with them in natural language, but have very specific criteria around what we ask for. It still feels a lot like the old text-based RPGs, in that you spend most of your time trying to figure out how to phrase something to accomplish a basic need, while angrily thinking "it would have just been easier/faster to pick up my phone." It's 2016. How are we still OK with the unreasonable constraints of technology that make us jump through a hoop like a trained poodle to get the treat?
- mikejmoffitt 11y ago
  Never mind that in order to use a voice service, it requires you to speak at a rate slower than many can type, all while demanding that the people in the room hush up so it won't get confused. Repeat if there was a mistake.
- firephreek 11y ago
  Try Hound. It's faster than anything I've tried and it's context management is just impressive as hell. The echos lack of negative clauses is really really frustrating.
- atomical 11y ago
  And if you do get beyond a narrow range does the user spend a lot of time thinking about how to craft a question so that the machine can understand it?
- pbreit 11y ago
  How complicated is controlling a TV or a radio? And voice is much easier for a variety of tasks than remote controls.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  I've found that the voice recognition on Android phones works well enough to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Navigating, getting directions, setting alarms, taking notes, sending text messages, sending emails, searching for things, and many more. When I was still using my Moto X I did the majority of every-day tasks with voice recognition. The iPhone is catching up fast too...my wife's taken to sending emails via Siri (to avoid strain on her hands), and most of the time it gets things perfectly. The biggest problem is privacy. One of the nice things about touchscreens is that you have a personal dialog with the device that can't be overheard by anyone nearby. That doesn't apply to voice recognition systems, and it can be pretty awkward to dictate an e-mail to a phone in a crowded place.
  - xigency 11y ago
    Being overheard isn't the only privacy concern. Most of these solutions offload the speech recognition and language parsing functions to corporate servers. I like texting with Siri but I'm not exactly keen on having Apple record everything. It also seems limiting in that I can't use voice commands without a network. It would be nice for voice recognition platforms to start being built in. I know there's training data that's needed, but there's some convenience afforded.
    - josh2600 11y ago
      I think the processing requirements for handling on-device Siri would destroy battery life.
      - euyyn 11y ago
        Plus the only way to train these things at scale is to upload the recordings once you have some usage.
      - gervase 11y ago
        This actually doesn't seem to be the case. Take a look at Google Translate's offline voice recognition AND translation - it's really amazing, considering it's all happening on your device.
- lyime 11y ago
  That holds true with pretty much all first generation products of it's type. The first "smart phones" couldn't do a whole lot of things. Over time, the Echo will improve and you'll be able to hold conversations with it.
  - chc 11y ago
    Just like you hold conversations with Siri, Cortana and Google Now?
    - deegles 11y ago
      Are they not first-gen?
      - chc 11y ago
        Well, I mean, they aren't fixed artifacts like a piece of hardware. I'm pretty sure they have been updated a few times.
  - samstave 11y ago
    My children are quite young. The world is going to be an amazingly interesting place when they are my age. I can recall the first time I ever saw a computer and how primitive they now look. Now we have little bots that listen to you and reply with info. When my two-year-old is forty - we will have ghost in the shell. It's crazy beautiful and scary to me that we all grew up reading cyberpunk fiction and watching anime and not all of us did, but pretty much all of us are actually building that future. There is a balance between dystopia and utopia though. We are all working at the Great Game - and the future is going to be interesting, but we can never turn back. So hopefully we keep the balance and get it right. My worry is that at this literal nascent stage of technology, that we don't fuck it up as we don't fight hard enough for privacy policy. We need privacy policy that is thinking at least 50 years in advance. The control of government apparatus is thinking in advance - I personally feel that the tech sector's vision is myopically focused on today's profits and not in the future where it should be viewing, with the exception of this most recent case between apple and the FBI. At least Cook's comments were salient and forward thinking and truly for the greater good... Let's hope that invigorates the tech industry as a whole to think about where we are headed.
- baby 11y ago
  is it better than google voice? Siri is completely useless for me but google voice recognize everything I said (love my new iphone 6s but I wish I could say "hey siri" and it would actually work).
- ams6110 11y ago
  I just can't stand talking to a computer. Never liked the idea of it. I loathe voice-controlled telephone menus. I can type faster than I can talk (if you include the inevitable revisions -- even without it's pretty close). I don't even like to leave messages on voicemail. I don't think voice interfaces are anything I will ever use if there's another option.
- ehnto 11y ago
  The other issue is it becomes less useful when more than one person is active in the room. Small party? Interface no longer functioning as talking in the background interferes.
jallmann 11y ago
> The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. It's also less accessible. I'm sure auditory UI is useful in many cases, but it also seems to be more cumbersome in others. In any case, I hope that pervasive auditory UI doesn't become any sort of standard without an accompanying visual/physical interface. > Try watching a scary movie with the sound turned off, it turns into a comedy Allow me to be pedantic and say it is that being fully immersed in the context of the movie that really matters. You could probably achieve a similar suspenseful effect with silence+subtitles, although I'm sure the experience isn't identical. Otherwise, the deaf could never enjoy scary movies, including me.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >It's also less accessible. For whom? To the blind this would be a godsend. From a practical medical perspective, audio is superior because we have decades of experience with effective ear implants to help the hard of hearing and the deaf, but the visual equivalent still eludes us.
  - jallmann 11y ago
    > To the blind this would be a godsend For sure. Different interfaces disadvantage different classes of people. There is no silver bullet; I'm trying to point out that an exclusively audio/voice-driven UI would not be desirable. > we have decades of experience with effective ear implants The problem is multi-faceted. Hearing loss, especially from a young age, often leads to difficulty speaking -- it is no use if a voice-driven system can't understand you in the first place. And while cochlear implant technology has helped a lot of people, it is by no means a cure, and there are many, many others that don't benefit enough from assistive technology to achieve functional equivalence (which is the key phrase when talking about accessibility). I have a cochlear implant and haven't worn it in years, because it really doesn't help.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    > To the blind this would be a godsend. Actually, I'd imagine that a good old-fashioned tty is pretty good for a blind person: it's TUIs and GUIs that get progressively more painful. Source: am blind without my glasses; can imagine preferring ed to emacs, vim, Atom, SublimeText if I had to use an audio interface.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
I really liked how this was done in the movie 'Her.' There's something especially nice about only having your attention distracted audibly and not visually, especially in public. I wonder if the smartphone age will go away as quickly as it came. I picture a world where we just have smart wearables like a watch which has a tiny visual interface, but a powerful audio one (speaker, earpiece, put watch up to ear, etc). It seems a lot less intrusive. I imagine as we get better with AI and voice recognition, it'll be as practical as a phone. What I'm able to do with Google Now on my watch is fairly impressive today. We already have the technology to understand things in context like "Navigate to Katz's deli" brings up Google Maps to the deli as opposed to a google search results page about navigating to a cat themed deli, which was the status quo not too long ago with voice search. I imagine carrying around this big selfie/facebook machine around, constantly charging it, whipping it out all the time, etc will be pretty gauche if wearable-only solutions become competitive.
- jkestner 11y ago
  For many functional tasks, I can see an auditory UI being superior. But currently most people use their smartphone to skim content. I don't want the equivalent of listening to voicemail for everything. Not to say that content can't shift for the medium, just as it always does. What would an audio Facebook sound like?
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Well, I do that now sorta on my watch with its small screen. I scroll through notifications, but no, I don't get the full FB web or mobile experience. I'm not sure how many people actually want that; I often hear complaints about how phones and apps aren't simple anymore. I also believe that we really haven't figured out the best way to use these small screens. I'm surprised at how usable my watch is sometimes with its 320x320 screen at 1.8". For reference the original iphone was 3.5" at 320x480 resolution. For teens and such I can see the big phone never going away but for most adults, having an inconspicuous wearable just seems like a more refined experience. I imagine there's a logical procession here from desktop > traditional laptop > ultrabook laptop/convertible > tablet > mobile > wearable. You lose functionality with every step, but depending on the use case, it doesn't really matter. For people in my peer group, a wearable that could work without a phone would sell like hotcakes.
Jack000 11y ago
I think the main problem with voice interfaces is that it's not discoverable. You need a good understanding of what the system can and cannot do, its current state etc before even speaking. CLI has the same issue, but at least you can man-xxx, which I imagine works a lot better in text than it does in audio.
- criddell 11y ago
  I think the goal is that the system gets to be good enough that nobody worries about discoverability any more. I think Google is quickly getting there with their search interface. I'm always amazed at what a good job Google does when I ask it a question like "what's the name of the instrument powered by steam" and milliseconds later it's showing me info about calliopes.
bruceboughton 11y ago
>> auditorial Don't you mean oral or aural?
pbreit 11y ago
Voice will become an important, if not the primary, interface to home/car audio/video.
samstave 11y ago
They should announce Amazon echo for the deaf, which would just be a screen.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  ... with a couple of kinect type devices to monitor one's signs.
bckmn 11y ago
You would probably be interested in what we've been building over at https://www.narro.co https://www.narro.co.
- visarga 11y ago
  It would be nice if it could extract forum discussions, like YC and Reddit. Sometimes I like to hear the text I am reading, it helps with concentration.
  - amelius 11y ago
    Yes, I'd like to see the possibility to select text, right click and select "read out loud".
    - kalleboo 11y ago
      I think all the browsers on OS X support that using the system text-to-speech (edit: Safari and Chrome, not Firefox)
      - amelius 11y ago
        I'm using Linux. It seems that Linux is falling behind in the area of speech input/output. I hope they will catch up.
jordache 11y ago
"computer lights on" "dimmer" no thank you.. i will use my hand
- prawn 11y ago
  And if you're on the couch watching a movie and the light switch is on the other side of the room? Or you want to switch on the porch light for guests. Or switch off outside lights?
  - jordache 11y ago
    i get my non-lazy ass up. For the few times where I may need to walk additionally around the house, it's a non issue
    - jsalit 11y ago
      and what if you weren't so mobile?
- dionidium 11y ago
  A device to change the channel on my TV? No thanks; I'll just use the dial on the TV.
  - jordache 11y ago
    let me pick up my phone, open the app for light control, dial in some setting, and hope the app doesn't crash. TV remotes are awesome because it has physical buttons, and it's fairly dumb... almost no chance of issues.

ghaff 11y ago

The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated. The Echo has pretty solid voice recognition--far better than anything else I've ever used--but it's still hard to get it to do anything useful once you get beyond a pretty narrow script. (e.g. what's the weather forecast, play this artist, etc.)

hoorayimhelping 11y ago
>The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated I've done a fair bit of interface engineering for the web. Between that and using so much software over the course of my life, I'd say that this applies to GUIs just as much as voice interfaces.
- jerf 11y ago
  Yes, but GUIs have two or three dimensions available (up/down, left/right, time) whereas voice just has the one (time). We humans can also full-duplex GUIs much more easily than voice-based interface. And GUIs at least can be hooked up to full-powered grammar-based interfaces whereas voice, somewhat ironically considering the nature of human communication, has more trouble with it. (I'd suggest this is actually a combination of the still-non-trivial nature of NLP, combined with a lack of feedback, combined with the fact that giving instructions is quite hard. Humans overestimate human language's ability to communicate clear directions, as anyone who has done tech support over a phone understands.)
  - hammock 11y ago
    Just as the mouse input has evolved to include multitouch and 3d touch gestures, voice input can also evolve. The full range of tone, inflection, pitch, etc is available from the human voice. I wonder if NLP research should have started as our ancestors did, with grunts and hoots and cries. Instead it's focused on recognizing full words and sentences while almost completely ignoring inflection. Another dimension to add with vocal input is directional. If you have mics in all corners of a room, which direction you speak in can affect whether "turn off" operates your TV, your lights or your oven.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      Very good points. I can't wait until devices can read my emotions or inflections in my voice. I can voice-to-text most of my short messages, but anything that requires punctuation or god forbid emojis still require manual input. And I don't want to have to say "period" or "exclamation mark" to indicate my desired punctuation. If I say it unusually loudly, insert an exclamation mark. If I pause at the end of a sentence (Word has known a grammatically correct sentence for decades) and don't say "um" or "uh", put a period. If my inflection goes up or there is a question word in the sentence, add a question mark. There is a lot of improvement for voice processing in several dimensions of voice.
  - krinchan 11y ago
    And copy and paste. People seem to always forget the power of it. It's the GUI equivalent of "Search for that on Google" or "Now, SSH to this IP I found digging through AWS." Copy and pasting of text from application to application is the clunky Unix Pipe. It's universal and deeply important. Taking sections of the last response, or hell, even having every response essentially be wrapped up in some sort of object you can reference in your next query to the interface is what all of these lack. Even Androids "Search this artist" doesn't quite get there. The lack of context between queries is what murders Siri for me. That and her seemingly random selection of what goes to Google and what goes to Wolphram Alpha. Sometimes even the "wolfram" verb prepended to a query just doesn't go to wolfram no matter what.
- Nullabillity 11y ago
  Sure, but the difference is that it's (almost) always obvious what actions are possible in a GUI. With voice interfaces you're back to trial-and-error.
- hrktb 11y ago
  There is still a fundamental problem with voice: it has to understand your words. A text field in contrast doesn't need any intelligence, nor do buttons. This is in particular important for instance for people living in non english speaking countries but using english in specific contexts (work, gaming, minor hobbies etc.). Switching language in audio applications are generally a PITA. Then even when you do the switch between languages every time, the engines are still have huge performance gaps between the languages. Sofware has become way extremely tolerant for multiple languages IMO. Voice recognition interfaces are not so mature yet in my experience.
NDizzle 11y ago
I'm not so sure about that. Check this out. One of the toughest fights in one of the toughest games performed with only voice commands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2a2dLdZ0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2a2dLdZ0M Now, granted, this is a specific use case, but, you know... "explore the space" and all that. (more cowbell!)
- ghaff 11y ago
  That's the thing. It is a use case with voice commands that map to specific actions. In the case of music, I can give Echo the name of a specific artist or maybe a playlist. But it breaks down pretty quickly if I tell it to play "some good 60s rock."
- rrrx3 11y ago
  The "play some good 60s rock" example isn't a VUI breakdown, it's a functionality gap in the backend. One that will probably be fixed pretty quickly, given the way things are headed. A VUI breakdown would be inability to understand accents, or non-responsiveness to commands. As a user input, Alexa is pretty well buttoned up.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    You're thinking too much like an engineer :-) It's not a speech recognition breakdown but it's certainly a voice interface breakdown in the sense of I can't get the device to do what I want it to do. As a user, I don't care where in the pipeline my attempts to communicate a desired action break down. I just know that they do.
    - gffrd 11y ago
      Exactly. We're used to dealing with either humans, who are intuitive and highly adaptive, and technology, which we manipulate and have total control over (so long as the system displays its status, we can find our way). We're not used to systems that expect us to interact with them in natural language, but have very specific criteria around what we ask for. It still feels a lot like the old text-based RPGs, in that you spend most of your time trying to figure out how to phrase something to accomplish a basic need, while angrily thinking "it would have just been easier/faster to pick up my phone." It's 2016. How are we still OK with the unreasonable constraints of technology that make us jump through a hoop like a trained poodle to get the treat?
mikejmoffitt 11y ago
Never mind that in order to use a voice service, it requires you to speak at a rate slower than many can type, all while demanding that the people in the room hush up so it won't get confused. Repeat if there was a mistake.
firephreek 11y ago
Try Hound. It's faster than anything I've tried and it's context management is just impressive as hell. The echos lack of negative clauses is really really frustrating.
atomical 11y ago
And if you do get beyond a narrow range does the user spend a lot of time thinking about how to craft a question so that the machine can understand it?
pbreit 11y ago
How complicated is controlling a TV or a radio? And voice is much easier for a variety of tasks than remote controls.
nostrademons 11y ago
I've found that the voice recognition on Android phones works well enough to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Navigating, getting directions, setting alarms, taking notes, sending text messages, sending emails, searching for things, and many more. When I was still using my Moto X I did the majority of every-day tasks with voice recognition. The iPhone is catching up fast too...my wife's taken to sending emails via Siri (to avoid strain on her hands), and most of the time it gets things perfectly. The biggest problem is privacy. One of the nice things about touchscreens is that you have a personal dialog with the device that can't be overheard by anyone nearby. That doesn't apply to voice recognition systems, and it can be pretty awkward to dictate an e-mail to a phone in a crowded place.
- xigency 11y ago
  Being overheard isn't the only privacy concern. Most of these solutions offload the speech recognition and language parsing functions to corporate servers. I like texting with Siri but I'm not exactly keen on having Apple record everything. It also seems limiting in that I can't use voice commands without a network. It would be nice for voice recognition platforms to start being built in. I know there's training data that's needed, but there's some convenience afforded.
  - josh2600 11y ago
    I think the processing requirements for handling on-device Siri would destroy battery life.
    - euyyn 11y ago
      Plus the only way to train these things at scale is to upload the recordings once you have some usage.
    - gervase 11y ago
      This actually doesn't seem to be the case. Take a look at Google Translate's offline voice recognition AND translation - it's really amazing, considering it's all happening on your device.
lyime 11y ago
That holds true with pretty much all first generation products of it's type. The first "smart phones" couldn't do a whole lot of things. Over time, the Echo will improve and you'll be able to hold conversations with it.
- chc 11y ago
  Just like you hold conversations with Siri, Cortana and Google Now?
  - deegles 11y ago
    Are they not first-gen?
    - chc 11y ago
      Well, I mean, they aren't fixed artifacts like a piece of hardware. I'm pretty sure they have been updated a few times.
- samstave 11y ago
  My children are quite young. The world is going to be an amazingly interesting place when they are my age. I can recall the first time I ever saw a computer and how primitive they now look. Now we have little bots that listen to you and reply with info. When my two-year-old is forty - we will have ghost in the shell. It's crazy beautiful and scary to me that we all grew up reading cyberpunk fiction and watching anime and not all of us did, but pretty much all of us are actually building that future. There is a balance between dystopia and utopia though. We are all working at the Great Game - and the future is going to be interesting, but we can never turn back. So hopefully we keep the balance and get it right. My worry is that at this literal nascent stage of technology, that we don't fuck it up as we don't fight hard enough for privacy policy. We need privacy policy that is thinking at least 50 years in advance. The control of government apparatus is thinking in advance - I personally feel that the tech sector's vision is myopically focused on today's profits and not in the future where it should be viewing, with the exception of this most recent case between apple and the FBI. At least Cook's comments were salient and forward thinking and truly for the greater good... Let's hope that invigorates the tech industry as a whole to think about where we are headed.
baby 11y ago
is it better than google voice? Siri is completely useless for me but google voice recognize everything I said (love my new iphone 6s but I wish I could say "hey siri" and it would actually work).
ams6110 11y ago
I just can't stand talking to a computer. Never liked the idea of it. I loathe voice-controlled telephone menus. I can type faster than I can talk (if you include the inevitable revisions -- even without it's pretty close). I don't even like to leave messages on voicemail. I don't think voice interfaces are anything I will ever use if there's another option.
ehnto 11y ago
The other issue is it becomes less useful when more than one person is active in the room. Small party? Interface no longer functioning as talking in the background interferes.

jallmann 11y ago

> The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. It's also less accessible. I'm sure auditory UI is useful in many cases, but it also seems to be more cumbersome in others. In any case, I hope that pervasive auditory UI doesn't become any sort of standard without an accompanying visual/physical interface. > Try watching a scary movie with the sound turned off, it turns into a comedy Allow me to be pedantic and say it is that being fully immersed in the context of the movie that really matters. You could probably achieve a similar suspenseful effect with silence+subtitles, although I'm sure the experience isn't identical. Otherwise, the deaf could never enjoy scary movies, including me.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>It's also less accessible. For whom? To the blind this would be a godsend. From a practical medical perspective, audio is superior because we have decades of experience with effective ear implants to help the hard of hearing and the deaf, but the visual equivalent still eludes us.
- jallmann 11y ago
  > To the blind this would be a godsend For sure. Different interfaces disadvantage different classes of people. There is no silver bullet; I'm trying to point out that an exclusively audio/voice-driven UI would not be desirable. > we have decades of experience with effective ear implants The problem is multi-faceted. Hearing loss, especially from a young age, often leads to difficulty speaking -- it is no use if a voice-driven system can't understand you in the first place. And while cochlear implant technology has helped a lot of people, it is by no means a cure, and there are many, many others that don't benefit enough from assistive technology to achieve functional equivalence (which is the key phrase when talking about accessibility). I have a cochlear implant and haven't worn it in years, because it really doesn't help.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > To the blind this would be a godsend. Actually, I'd imagine that a good old-fashioned tty is pretty good for a blind person: it's TUIs and GUIs that get progressively more painful. Source: am blind without my glasses; can imagine preferring ed to emacs, vim, Atom, SublimeText if I had to use an audio interface.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

I really liked how this was done in the movie 'Her.' There's something especially nice about only having your attention distracted audibly and not visually, especially in public. I wonder if the smartphone age will go away as quickly as it came. I picture a world where we just have smart wearables like a watch which has a tiny visual interface, but a powerful audio one (speaker, earpiece, put watch up to ear, etc). It seems a lot less intrusive. I imagine as we get better with AI and voice recognition, it'll be as practical as a phone. What I'm able to do with Google Now on my watch is fairly impressive today. We already have the technology to understand things in context like "Navigate to Katz's deli" brings up Google Maps to the deli as opposed to a google search results page about navigating to a cat themed deli, which was the status quo not too long ago with voice search. I imagine carrying around this big selfie/facebook machine around, constantly charging it, whipping it out all the time, etc will be pretty gauche if wearable-only solutions become competitive.

jkestner 11y ago
For many functional tasks, I can see an auditory UI being superior. But currently most people use their smartphone to skim content. I don't want the equivalent of listening to voicemail for everything. Not to say that content can't shift for the medium, just as it always does. What would an audio Facebook sound like?
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Well, I do that now sorta on my watch with its small screen. I scroll through notifications, but no, I don't get the full FB web or mobile experience. I'm not sure how many people actually want that; I often hear complaints about how phones and apps aren't simple anymore. I also believe that we really haven't figured out the best way to use these small screens. I'm surprised at how usable my watch is sometimes with its 320x320 screen at 1.8". For reference the original iphone was 3.5" at 320x480 resolution. For teens and such I can see the big phone never going away but for most adults, having an inconspicuous wearable just seems like a more refined experience. I imagine there's a logical procession here from desktop > traditional laptop > ultrabook laptop/convertible > tablet > mobile > wearable. You lose functionality with every step, but depending on the use case, it doesn't really matter. For people in my peer group, a wearable that could work without a phone would sell like hotcakes.

Jack000 11y ago

I think the main problem with voice interfaces is that it's not discoverable. You need a good understanding of what the system can and cannot do, its current state etc before even speaking. CLI has the same issue, but at least you can man-xxx, which I imagine works a lot better in text than it does in audio.

criddell 11y ago
I think the goal is that the system gets to be good enough that nobody worries about discoverability any more. I think Google is quickly getting there with their search interface. I'm always amazed at what a good job Google does when I ask it a question like "what's the name of the instrument powered by steam" and milliseconds later it's showing me info about calliopes.

bruceboughton 11y ago

>> auditorial Don't you mean oral or aural?

pbreit 11y ago

Voice will become an important, if not the primary, interface to home/car audio/video.

samstave 11y ago

They should announce Amazon echo for the deaf, which would just be a screen.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
... with a couple of kinect type devices to monitor one's signs.

bckmn 11y ago

You would probably be interested in what we've been building over at https://www.narro.co https://www.narro.co.

visarga 11y ago
It would be nice if it could extract forum discussions, like YC and Reddit. Sometimes I like to hear the text I am reading, it helps with concentration.
- amelius 11y ago
  Yes, I'd like to see the possibility to select text, right click and select "read out loud".
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    I think all the browsers on OS X support that using the system text-to-speech (edit: Safari and Chrome, not Firefox)
    - amelius 11y ago
      I'm using Linux. It seems that Linux is falling behind in the area of speech input/output. I hope they will catch up.

jordache 11y ago

"computer lights on" "dimmer" no thank you.. i will use my hand

prawn 11y ago
And if you're on the couch watching a movie and the light switch is on the other side of the room? Or you want to switch on the porch light for guests. Or switch off outside lights?
- jordache 11y ago
  i get my non-lazy ass up. For the few times where I may need to walk additionally around the house, it's a non issue
  - jsalit 11y ago
    and what if you weren't so mobile?
dionidium 11y ago
A device to change the channel on my TV? No thanks; I'll just use the dial on the TV.
- jordache 11y ago
  let me pick up my phone, open the app for light control, dial in some setting, and hope the app doesn't crash. TV remotes are awesome because it has physical buttons, and it's fairly dumb... almost no chance of issues.