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> Can anyone convince me?

I find it extremely cringy to talk to a machine and get very annoyed at correcting transcription errors in the middle of a sentence or paragraph after it was transcribed. If you don't find it cringy to use voice assistants I guess you're just a different type of person and would prefer talking instead of typing.



Cringy? That is an interesting take.

I can sympathize with the dislike of voice assistance as they are pretty universally crap. But recording yourself monologuing and having it AI transcribed can feel really natural.

I still default to typing, but whenever I'm feeling writers block, I'll just start thinking out loud and record it to get started and it works quite nicely.


> Cringy? That is an interesting take.

Yeah I'm not sure if I'm just weird or what, but from the start with voice assistants I've been utterly confused that people want to talk to machines using a shitty interface and broadcasting to others what they are doing (not even talking about the NSA, just people in my vicinity). Imagine being in my room, saying out loud each URL I wanted to visit. It feels as cringy as if instead of turning a page silently in a book while I'm sitting in my room reading, I would instead disrupt that silence and focus by telling the book "TURN PAGE". That's how it feels to me when I hear someone say "OKAY GOOGLE", I almost physically recoil.

It's like you have a nice silent interface that will be perfectly interpreted, and decide instead to be loud and imprecise and have to guess if the machine is going to understand you. I think maybe rather than cringy another word would be that it feels in bad taste. It's half about the "style" and half about the lack of "function" of the medium. It's effectively worse in terms of reliability and you look like someone that doesn't know how to use a computer all at the same time.


Ah, I get what you mean. For any interaction, I fully agree with you. I would hate to be in a room with someone who is interacting with their machine through voice.

I was reading the parent of your post as using these speech-to-text tools for dictation, not for interaction. I think they can be quite useful for dictation (if they can interpret your voice well).


"Okay google" is so gross. Totally the apex of imposed advertising.

Physically recoil in fact, like a bitter taste in my mouth.

However, as opposed to some assistant turning imaginary 'pages' in .epub, sitting alone in focused dictation is a really great way to explore your mind and have free roaming thought processes.

It is also not new in any sense, e.g., Dostoyevsky dictated The Idiot to a stenographer.


>"Okay google" is so gross.

It suddenly stopped working on my phone. Somehow without my explicit direction it has switched to "Hey Google".

Even though my usage of smartphone is minimal something like "Hey Google ... Drive to 3 Bullshit Ave" is very convenient and causes zero sensory recoil. But I do not live my life on the phone either.


That brings up the other natural user interface that's missing, which is gesture recognition.

https://atap.google.com/soli/

I suppose it'll take another generation before people start to wonder why everyone used to hunch over a computer "in the old days"


I wouldn't use the word cringy myself, but I think I get where they're coming from. Reading the output of speech recognition a few seconds behind is jarring. Constant game of anticipation. Will it get that name or term right? Nope. Now I have to pause dictation, go back, and fix it. It's more involved than tapping backspace a couple times, the feedback is less instant, and that means more things I have to keep in my working memory, which is non-existent.


I also get annoyed at correcting voice errors. Wish it was better.

However, I don’t find it cringy. Seems like that would be a more natural interface. It would make mobile devices more productive, for example.

Hang out in a park and write, develop software, etc on a tablet or phone. Removing the keyboard from the computer makes it seem more natural to me.




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